From the description given in _The Spectator_ and other contemporary writings--such as "facetious" Tom Brown's _Trip through London_ of 1728, and the like--it is easy to reconstruct in imagination the interior of one of these resorts as they appeared in the time of Queen Anne. Occasionally the coffee-room, as at the famous "Will's" in Russell Street, Covent Garden, was on the first floor. Tables were disposed about the sanded floor--the erection of boxes did not come in until a later date--while on the walls were numerous flaming advertisements of quack medicines, pills and tinctures, salves and electuaries, which were as abundant then as now, and of other wares which might be bought at the bar. The bar was at the entrance to the temple of coffee and gossip, and was presided over by the predecessors of the modern barmaids--grumbled at in _The Spectator_ as "idols," who there received homage from their admirers, and who paid more attention to customers who flirted with them than to more sober-minded visitors; and described by Tom Brown as "a charming Phillis or two, who invite you by their amorous glances into their smoaky territories." At the bar messages were left and letters taken in for regular customers. In the early days of Swift's friendship with Addison, Stella was instructed to address her letters to the former under cover to Addison at the "St. James's" Coffee-house, in St. James's Street; but as the friendship between the two men cooled the cover was dispensed with, and the letters were addressed to Swift himself at the coffee-house, where they were placed, doubtless with many others, in the glass frame behind the bar. Stella's handwriting was very like that of her famous correspondent, and one day Harley, afterwards Earl of Oxford, seeing one of Stella's letters in the glass frame and thinking the writing was Swift's, asked the latter, when he met him shortly afterwards, how long he had learned the trick of writing to himself. Swift says he could hardly persuade him that he was mistaken in the writing. The coffee-houses were the haunts of clubs and coteries almost from the date of their first establishment. Steele, in the familiar introduction to _The Tatler_, tells us how accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment were to come from "White's" Chocolate-house; poetry from "Will's" Coffee-house; learning from the "Grecian"; and foreign and domestic news from the "St. James's." Nearly fifty years later, Bonnell Thornton, in the first number of _The Connoisseur_, January 31st, 1754, similarly enumerates some of the leading houses. "White's" was still the fashionable resort; "Garraway's" was for stock-jobbers; "Batson's" for doctors; the "Bedford" for "wits" and men of parts; the "Chapter" for book-sellers; and "St. Paul's" for the clergy. Mackay, in his _Journey through England_, published in 1724, says that