In most coffee-houses, you may also have chops or steaks for dinner. If the party be a _rigid economist(!)_ he may, as regards some of these _establishments_, purchase his steak or chop himself, and it will be prepared gratuitously for him; but if that be too much trouble for him to take, and he prefers ordering it at once, he will get, in many houses, his chop with bread and potatoes with it for sixpence, and his steak for ninepence or tenpence. These coffee-houses have many advantages over hotels, besides the great difference in the prices charged. In the first place, there is not so much _formality_ or _affected dignity_ about them, and they are far better provided with means of rational amusement; and the promptitude with which a customer is served is really surprising. Are not these passages declarations of the individual? Winding himself up with twopenny-worth of cheese! Pleading for the additional penny for the waitress, whose personal charms and obliging disposition must be considered to extort the amount! And above all, unable to conceive any motive, except aversion to trouble, for disliking to carry "his chop" upon a skewer through the streets of London. How every line revels in the recollection of having dined, and speaks how seldom! while the _well-buttered_ bread infers the usual fare. Still it is not meanly written. There are a glorying and exultation in every word that redeem it, and show the author is more to be envied than compassionated; though a little further on we perceive the shifts to which his homeless state has reduced him. MEDITATION IN LONDON. You can order, if you please, a cup of coffee without anything to it; and, for so doing, you may sit if you wish for five or six hours in succession. I have said that coffee-houses are excellent places for reading; I might have added, for _meditation_ also. For unlike public-houses, there are no noisy discussions and disputes in them. All is calm, tranquil, and comfortable. The beverage, too, which is drank as a beverage, as I before remarked in a previous chapter, _cheers, but not inebriates_. The remarks are generally equally original, and the facts, no doubt in some degree truths, are all alike humorous; the more so when the aspect of the book and the names of the respectable publishers suggest the higher class of readers to whom it is addressed. Little anecdotes are interspersed, concerning Harriet, of Coventry-street, who didn't mind her stops; and James, behind the Mansion-house, who knew everybody's appetite, that enliven the descriptive portions of the work, which is in its very inappropriateness the more amusing, and cannot be read without reaping both information and instruction on topics which no other author would have had the temerity to discuss.