This I recollect, because he repeated it several times, and seemed much gratified by it. At our next meeting he produced his epitaphs, as they stand in the little posthumous poem above mentioned, and this was the last time he ever enjoyed the company of his friends."[12] Mr. Cunningham tells us that the St. James's was closed about 1806; and a large pile of building looking down Pall Mall, erected on its site. The globular oil-lamp was first exhibited by its inventor, Michael Cole, at the door of the St. James's Coffee-house, in 1709; in the patent he obtained, it is mentioned as "a new kind of light." FOOTNOTE: [12] _Cumberland's Memoirs_, vol. i. THE BRITISH COFFEE-HOUSE, In Cockspur-street, "long a house of call for Scotchmen," has been fortunate in its landladies. In 1759, it was kept by the sister of Bishop Douglas, so well known for his works against Lauder and Bower, which may explain its Scottish fame. At another period it was kept by Mrs. Anderson, described in Mackenzie's _Life of Home_ as "a woman of uncommon talents, and the most agreeable conversation."[13] The British figures in a political faction of 1750, at which date Walpole writes to Sir Horace Mann: "The Argyll carried all the Scotch against the turnpike; they were willing to be carried, for the Duke of Bedford, in case it should have come into the Lords, had writ to the sixteen Peers, to solicit their votes; but with so little difference, that he enclosed all the letters under one cover directed to the British Coffee-house." FOOTNOTE: [13] _Cunningham's Walpole_, vol. ii. p. 196, note. WILL'S COFFEE-HOUSE.[14] Will's, the predecessor of Button's, and even more celebrated than that Coffee-house, was kept by William Urwin, and was the house on the north side of Russell-street at the end of Bow-street--the corner house--now occupied as a ham and beef shop, and numbered twenty-three. "It was Dryden who made Will's Coffee-house the great resort of the wits of his time." (_Pope_ and _Spence_). The room in which the poet was accustomed to sit was on the first floor; and his place was the place of honour by fire-side in the winter; and at the corner of the balcony, looking over the street, in fine weather; he called the two places his winter and his summer seat. This was called the dining-room floor in the last century. The company did not sit in boxes, as subsequently, but at various tables which were dispersed through the room. Smoking was permitted in the public room: it was then so much in vogue that it does not seem to have been considered a nuisance. Here, as in other similar places of meeting, the visitors divided themselves into parties; and we are told by Ward, that the young beaux and wits, who seldom approached the principal table, thought it a great honour to have a pinch out of Dryden's snuff-box.