We have far from exhausted the list of the ladies distinguished for wit and beauty who figure in Horace Walpole’s ’Letters,’ but our space is exhausted. We cannot, however, conclude without a few words on the ’Letters’ in question. Their chief value consists in the lively descriptions of public events; not as dry and cold history records them, but by letting us have peeps behind the scenes, so as to see the wire-pullers, the secret machinery, which set in motion the actors on the political and social stage. They show us lords and ladies in their negligés, and how the conceit of a hairdresser, or the caprice of a lady’s-maid, may make or mar the destinies of a nation. This copious letter-writing forms indeed an era in our literary history which will never return or be renewed; the prying reporter and the irrepressible interviewer now supply all the world with what the letter-writer communicated to a few friends only. This present age may be called the Age of Reminiscences: everybody is writing his; of making books there is no end! *III.* *OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES.* A comparatively small room, considering it was one for public use, with dingy walls, a grimy ceiling, a sanded floor, boxes with upright backs and narrow seats, wooden chairs, liquor-stained tables, lighted up in the evening with smoky lamps or guttering candles, the whole room reeking with tobacco like a guard-room—such was the coffee-house of the later Stuart and the whole Georgian periods. Its distinctive article of furniture was spittoons. In such dens did the noblemen, in flowing wigs and embroidered coats, parsons in cassocks and bands, physicians in sable suits and tremendous perukes, together with broken-down gamesters, swindlers, country yokels, and out-at-elbows literary and theatrical adventurers, meet, not only for pleasure, but for business too. Dr. Radcliffe, who in 1685 had the largest practice in London, was daily to be seen at Garraway’s, now demolished, its site being included in Martin’s bank; and another favourite resort of doctors hereby was Batson’s, where, as the ’Connoisseur’ says, ’the dispensers of life and death flock together, like birds of prey watching for carcases. I never enter this place but it serves as a _memento mori_ to me.... Batson’s has been reckoned the seat of solemn stupidity.’