The French drink a single cup of strong coffee without cream immediately after dinner, and find digestion go on all the better for it. It acts as a strong stimulant, and certainly increases the feeling of comfort for the time. Like all other stimulants, however, its use is attended with the disadvantage of exhausting the sensibility of the part on which it acts, and inducing weakness. This inconvenience is not felt to the same extent indeed after coffee as after spirits, but still it exists; and it is infinitely better that the stomach should be brought up to do its own work ungrudgingly, than taught to depend upon assistance from without; and therefore such assistance ought to be reserved for the relief of occasional exhaustion, instead of being resorted to as a regular indulgence. The French partake of a much greater variety of dishes at one meal than we are accustomed to do, and may thus require the aid of coffee to keep the stomach from actual rebellion. But the way to obviate this necessity, is obviously to eat a more simple and more moderate meal. A great deal has been said and written about the properties of tea and coffee as articles of diet. At present, however, we have to do with them only as elements of a third meal, and must reserve the discussion of the other branch of the subject to a future opportunity. * * * * * In determining whether a third meal ought to be taken either as tea or as supper, the general principle already laid down will be very useful. If dinner be sufficiently early to admit of digestion being completed and the stomach afterwards recruited by repose, and if the mode of life be active, so as to occasion a natural return of appetite before the day is done, the propriety of a third meal cannot be questioned. But if dinner be late, and there be too short an interval between it and bedtime to admit of digestion being finished and the appetite renewed, then every additional mouthful swallowed is sure to do mischief. The farmer who dines at two o’clock, for example, and, after walking about his fields for three or four hours in the afternoon, comes home in the evening with a genuine and undeniable appetite, has a legitimate right to an additional supply of wholesome food before betaking himself to his couch; because a sufficient interval has elapsed to allow the stomach to recover itself from the labour of digesting his dinner, and the continued waste of the system requires to be replaced. In like manner, the man of fashion who dines at seven o’clock, and frequents assemblies till three or four in the morning, is well entitled to some kind of supper about one or two o’clock, and could scarcely get through his laborious duties without farther sustenance from either food or wine, or both. Even in his case, six hours may thus intervene betwixt dinner and supper; and we know that, on an average, the digestion of a moderate meal is finished in four or five hours. The chief difference