=47=: 28. =Place of general resort.= The coffee-houses played a very important part in the London life of Queen Anne's time. They were frequented by all classes,--wits and scholars, divines, politicians, men of business, and men of fashion. Each of the more famous houses had its own class of patrons, and thus served as a kind of club. Men frequently had their letters left there--as Swift used to do, instead of at his lodgings--and could count on meeting congenial acquaintances there at any time. An observant French traveler, Henri Misson, whose book was translated in 1719, gives a pleasant glimpse of the coffee-house interior: "You have all Manner of Newes there: You have a good Fire, which you may sit by as long as you please; You have a Dish of Coffee; You meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business; and all for a Penny, if you don't Care to spend more." In the better houses, cards or dicing were not allowed, and swearing and quarrelling were punished by fines. The coffee-houses mentioned in the text were, in 1710, those most widely known. Will's, at the corner of Bow and Great Russell streets, near the Drury Lane Theatre, was the famous house where, during the last decade of the seventeenth century, the great Dryden had held his chair as literary dictator, and it was still a favourite resort both for men of letters and men of affairs; it was from Will's that Steele dated all those papers in _The Tatler_ which were concerned with poetry. Child's, in St. Paul's church-yard, was frequented by the clergy and by men of learning; the Grecian, in Devereaux Court, just off the Strand, was also the resort of scholars and of barristers from the Temple--Steele dated from there all "accounts of learning" in his _Tatler_. The St James, near the foot of St. James Street, was a thoroughly Whig house, as the Cocoa Tree on the opposite side of the street was a Tory. Jonathan's, in Exchange Alley, near the heart of the city, was the headquarters of stockjobbers. All these were coffee-houses, except the Cocoa Tree, which called itself a chocolate-house. The chocolate-houses were few in number, higher in prices, and less popular than the coffee-houses. Steele gives a pleasant account of coffee-house customs in _Spectator_, No. 49. See also two papers by Addison on coffee-house talk, _Spectator_, Nos. 403, 568. For a fuller account of London Coffee-houses in Addison's time, see Ashton's _Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne_, Chap. xviii, and Besant's _London in the Eighteenth Century_, Chap. xii. =48=: 5. =The Postman.= One of the little newspapers of the Queen Anne time, issued thrice a week and edited by a French Protestant named Fontive. =48=: 11. =Drury Lane and the Haymarket.= These two famous theaters were, in 1710, the only ones open in London.