----- Great efforts were made, during the reign of Anne, to multiply churches, but, at the same time, there was an enormous increase of places of public resort and public discussion. Club-houses, chocolate-houses, and coffee-houses became so numerous that, besides the large ones, there was one or more for almost every parish in the capital, in which citizens regaled themselves to their hearts’ content, and found fault with the management of public matters. On entering a coffee-house, the visitor had only to pay a penny at the bar, and for this he was not only served with a cup of coffee, but accommodated with the newspapers of the day, and with the newest pamphlets on morals and on politics. Tradesmen forsook their shops, and merchants their offices, to take care of the affairs of state, and to harangue upon the misconduct of the ministry, until, by neglecting their business, those oratorical financiers and disinterested patriots were, not unfrequently, seized by an ambushment of bumbailiffs, and, after having defrayed the debts of the nation, were ignominiously conducted to a sponging-house for not being able to pay their own. While the middle and the lower classes were thus discussing politics, the fashionable orders were devoted to pleasure and to gallantry. From ten to twelve the beau received his visitors in bed, where he lay in state, his periwig, superbly powdered, lying beside him on the sheets; while his toilet-table was sprinkled with amorous poems, a canister of Spanish snuff, a smelling bottle, and a few fashionable trinkets. At twelve he rose, and after spending three hours in perfuming his clothes, in soaking his hands in washes to make them delicate and white, in tinging his cheeks with carminative to give them a gentle blush, in dipping his handkerchief in rose water, and in powdering his linen to banish from it the smell of soap—the self-indulgent exquisite then sat down to dinner. At four o’clock, he repaired to some place of public concourse, where he endeavoured to display his gallantry and wit. At five, he proceeded to the theatre, where, to give himself the air of a critic, he readjusted his cravat, and sprinkled his face with snuff. From the theatre he would wander to the park, buzzing and fluttering from lady to lady, and chattering to each a jargon made up of bad English, atrocious French, and undistinguishable Latin. And then, his lounge in the park being ended, he concluded the day by dropping into some fashionable party, where he chatted his empty nothings, played at ombre, and lost his money with an air of fashionable indifference.