hideous word then employed—of coffee and tea censors and licensers of books, and judges of the truth or falsehood of political opinions and intelligence. After that no more was heard of the matter, and the coffee-houses remained political debating clubs, as is proved by the remarks on them in the _Spectator_ and similar publications. See, for instance, Nos. 403, 476, 481, 521, etc. The first London coffee-house was set up by one Bowman, coachman to Mr. Hodges, a Turkey merchant. Others say that Mr. Edwards brought over with him a Ragusa servant, Pasqua Rosee, who was associated with Bowman in establishing the first coffee-house in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill. But the partners soon quarrelled. They parted, and Bowman opened a coffee-house in St. Michael’s Churchyard, from which we may infer that the public took to the new drink. Rosee issued handbills headed: ’The vertue of the coffee-drink. First made and publicly sold in England by Pasqua Rosee, at the sign of his own head.’ The original of one of them is preserved in the British Museum. It is generally said that the second coffee-house in London was that established as the Rainbow (now a tavern) in Fleet Street, by one Fair, a barber, in the year 1657. In the _Mercurius Politicus_ of September 30, 1658, an advertisement appeared, setting forth the virtues of the then equally new beverage, namely, _tcha_, or _tay_, or _tee_, which was sold at the Sultaness Head _Cophee-house_, in Sweeting’s Rents, by the Royal Exchange. We thus see that as early as 1658 there were already three coffee-houses in London. But coffee met with opponents. The vintners called it ’sooty drink’; lampooners said it undermined virile power, and that to drink it was to ape the Turks and insult one’s canary-drinking ancestors. Fair, the founder of the Rainbow, already mentioned, was indicted for ’making and selling a sort of liquor, called coffee, whereby in making it he annoyed his neighbours by evil smells, and for keeping of fire for the most part night and day, to the great danger and affrightment of his neighbours.’ But Farr stood his ground, and in time became a person of importance in the parish, and coffee-houses multiplied. Cornhill and its purlieus were full of them. There were the Great Turk, Sword Blade, Rainbow, Garraway, Jerusalem, Tom’s, and Weston’s Coffee-Houses in Exchange Alley alone; in St. Michael’s Alley, close by, there were, besides Rosee’s, Williams’s, and other coffee-houses. They also, as we have seen, had been established further west than the City, and they were also, as already mentioned, places of rendezvous, where appointments were made, where lawyers met clients, and doctors patients, merchants their customers, clerks their masters, where farce-writers, journalists, politicians, and literary hacks went to pick up ideas, and, as it was then called, watch, and if they could, catch the humours of the town. The _Spectator_, in his very first number, acknowledges his indebtedness