Were I to discuss, to describe, or even cursorily to touch on the social characteristics of any one of the numerous classes of Continental coffee-houses, I should require a book rather than a column. The subject is one so cosmopolitan, so intimately bound up with the progress of civilization, that, while ostensibly penning a paper on coffee-shops, I should be in reality writing a history of the manners, customs and social peculiarities of the peoples who were coffee-drinkers. So, seductive as are the temptations of Continental coffee-shops, I will not venture to touch upon them now. I will reserve for a more convenient opportunity the brilliant Parisian _cafés_, and the consideration of the influence they have had upon the progress of the decorative arts in France; I will reserve the coffee-houses of Germany where pipes and dominoes are the rule, and clean coffee-cups and clean waiters the exception; the _cafés_ of Venice and Milan; the _cafés_ and _cafejis_ of Stamboul and Smyrna; the coffee-houses where there are concerts; where there are dramatic performances; where there are orchestras recruited by blind men; where there are dances and orgies, and feasts of cucumbers and hard eggs, as on the Port at Antwerp; where circulate massive white tureens of coffee considerably modified, or aggravated by schnaps, as at the great pilots’ coffee-house, the “Kœning Leopold” at Ostend. Of the present state and position of coffee-shops in one country, I feel myself called upon, however, briefly to treat. The coffee-houses of London have, within the last thirty years, done, to my mind, so much good; have worked such important results, and offer so many curious questions for solution, both social and commercial, that I should be unjust were I to pass them over. I mean the genuine, orthodox, London coffee-houses--coffee-shops, if you will; where coffee is dispensed to the million at varying rates of one penny, three half-pence, and two-pence per cup; where eggs, bread and butter, bacon, and similar refreshments are provided at moderate rates; but where no ardent spirits or fermented liquors of any kind are either demanded by the customers or conceded by the proprietors; where--in lieu of the glasses that were wont to circle round the board, and the good company that was wont to fall underneath it in the old-fashioned coffee-houses--there is provided for the serious, well-conducted frequenters, a feast of newspapers and a flow of cheap periodicals. You and I can remember when such coffee-houses were not. If, in the old time, we wanted a cup, a dish or a bowl of coffee, we were compelled to go to the coffee-room of an hotel for it; provided always that we did not care to consume it at home. And coffee at home, even, was in those days, not by any means a faultless compound. Our aunts and mothers and sisters were blindly attached to certain prejudices and superstitions respecting the fining or clearing of coffee.