In 1710-11 Addison, starting the “_Spectator_ along with Steele,” tells us his own grave face was well known at the Grecian; and in No. 49 (April 1711), the _Spectator_ describes the spleen and inward laughter with which he views at the Grecian the young Templars come in, about 8 A.M., either dressed for Westminster, and with the preoccupied air of assumed business, or in gay cap, slippers, and particoloured dressing-gowns, rising early to publish their laziness, and being displaced by busier men towards noon. Dr. King relates a story of two hot-blooded young gentlemen quarrelling one evening at this coffee-house about the accent of a Greek word. Stepping out into Devereux Court, they fought, and one of them being run through the body, died on the spot.[57] This Dr. King was principal of St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford, and a staunch Tory. It is he who relates the secret visit of the Pretender to London. He died in 1763. Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds topographer, met Dr. Sloane, the secretary of the Royal Society, by appointment at the Grecian in May 1712; and again in June he describes retiring to the Grecian after a meeting of the Royal Society, of which he was a fellow, with the president, Sir Isaac Newton,[58] Dr. Halley, who published the _Principia_ for Newton, and Keill, who opposed Leibnitz about the invention of Fluxions, and defended Newton’s doctrines against the Cartesians. (The Royal Society held its meetings at this time in Crane Court, Fleet Street.) Roger North, Attorney-General under James II., who died in 1733, describes in his _Examen_ the Privy Council Board, as held at the Grecian coffee-house. The Grecian was closed in 1843, and has been since turned into the Grecian Chambers. On what was once the front of the coffee-house frequented by Steele and Addison, there is a bust of Essex, with the date 1676. In this court, at the house of one Kedder, in 1678, died Marchmont Needham, a vigorous but unprincipled turncoat and newspaper writer, who three times during the civil wars changed his principles to save his worthless neck. He was alternately the author of the _Mercurius Britannicus_ for the Presbyterians, _Mercurius Pragmaticus_ for the king, and _Mercurius Politicus_ for the Independents. The great champion of the late usurper, as the Cavaliers called him, “whose pen, compared with others’, was as a weaver’s beam,” latterly practised as a physician, but with small success.[59]