the only places, probably, where they were extensively read. In return for the doubtful celebrity thus conferred upon his rhymes, he attacked the satirist in a wretched production, intituled _Apollo's Maggot in his Cups_; his expiring effort, probably, for he died, as recorded in the pages of our first volume, on the 22nd of June, 1731. His remains were buried in the churchyard of Old St. Pancras, his body being followed to the grave solely by his wife and daughter, as directed by him in his poetical will, written some six years before. We learn from Noble that there are no less than four engraved portraits of Ned Ward. The structure of the _London Spy_, the only work of his that at present comes under our notice, is simple enough. The author is self-personified as a countryman, who, tired with his "tedious confinement to a country hutt," comes up to London; where he fortunately meets with a quondam school-fellow,--a "man about town," in modern phrase,--who undertakes to introduce him to the various scenes, sights, and mysteries of the, even then, "great metropolis:" much like the visit, in fact, from Jerry Hawthorn to Corinthian Tom, only anticipated by some hundred and twenty years. "We should not be at all surprised (says the _Gentleman's Magazine_,) to find that the stirring scenes of Pierce Egan's _Life in London_ were first suggested by more homely pages of the _London Spy_." At the outset of the work we have a description--not a very flattering one, certainly--of a common coffee-house of the day, one of the many hundreds with which London then teemed. Although coffee had been only known in England some fifty years, coffee-houses were already among the most favourite institutions of the land; though they had not as yet attained the political importance which they acquired in the days of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, some ten or twelve years later:--