step, demure looks, sufficient sense, and knows the town ... the fellow covers his knowledge of the nature of his messages with the most exquisite low humour imaginable; the first he obliged Flavia to take was by complaining to her that he had a wife and three children, and if she did not take that letter, which he was sure there was no harm in, but rather love, his family must go supperless to bed, for the gentleman would pay him according as he did his business.’ He would seem to have been a mild Leporello. We find the cheapness of living at coffee-houses frequently extolled in the publications and conversations of the day in which they were most flourishing. An Irish painter, whom Johnson knew, declared that £30 a year was enough to enable a man to live in London, without being contemptible. He allowed £10 for clothes and linen. He said a man might live in a garret at 1s. 6d. a week; few people would inquire where he lodged, and if they did, it was easy to say: ’Sir, you will find me at such and such a place’—just as nowadays impecunious swells, who live in garrets, manage to keep up their club subscription, and give as their address that of the club. By spending threepence at a coffee-house, Johnson’s Irish painter further argued, a man might be for some hours every day in very good company; he might dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread-and-milk for a penny, and do without supper. On clean-shirt day the painter went out to pay visits, as Swift also did. With regard to the persons employed in a coffee-house, we learn from one advertisement: ’To prevent all mistakes among gentlemen of the other end of the town, who come but once a week to St. James’s Coffee-house, either by miscalling the servants, or requiring such things from them as are not properly within their respective provinces, this is to give notice that Kidney, keeper of the book-debts of the outlying customers, and observer of those who go off without paying, having resigned that employment, is succeeded by John Sowton, to whose place of caterer of messages and first coffee-grinder William Bird is promoted, and Samuel Bardock comes as shoe-cleaner in the room of the said Bird.’ Well, the coffee-houses are things of the past; a few survive as taverns. What may be considered as their successors are called coffee-shops, patronized by working-men chiefly, but the ’humours’ are of the tamest description; they may supply statistics to temperance apostles, but no literary entertainment to the public. *IV.* *OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS.*