[Footnote 4: This is said to allude to a description of the Pyramids of Egypt, by John Greaves, a Persian scholar and Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, who studied the principle of weights and measures in the Roman Foot and the Denarius, and whose visit to the Pyramids in 1638, by aid of his patron Laud, was described in his 'Pyramidographia.' That work had been published in 1646, sixty-five years before the appearance of the 'Spectator', and Greaves died in 1652. But in 1706 appeared a tract, ascribed to him by its title-page, and popular enough to have been reprinted in 1727 and 1745, entitled, 'The Origine and Antiquity of our English Weights and Measures discovered by their near agreement with such Standards that are now found in one of the Egyptian Pyramids.' It based its arguments on measurements in the 'Pyramidographia,' and gave to Professor Greaves, in Addison's time, the same position with regard to Egypt that has been taken in our time by the Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, Professor Piazzi Smyth.] [Footnote 5: publick] [Footnote 6: 'Will's' Coffee House, which had been known successively as the 'Red Cow' and the 'Rose' before it took a permanent name from Will Urwin, its proprietor, was the corner house on the north side of Russell Street, at the end of Bow Street, now No. 21. Dryden's use of this Coffee House caused the wits of the town to resort there, and after Dryden's death, in 1700, it remained for some years the Wits' Coffee House. There the strong interest in current politics took chiefly the form of satire, epigram, or entertaining narrative. Its credit was already declining in the days of the 'Spectator'; wit going out and card-play coming in.] [Footnote 7: 'Child's' Coffee House was in St. Paul's Churchyard. Neighbourhood to the Cathedral and Doctors' Commons made it a place of resort for the Clergy. The College of Physicians had been first established in Linacre's House, No. 5, Knightrider Street, Doctors' Commons, whence it had removed to Amen Corner, and thence in 1674 to the adjacent Warwick Lane. The Royal Society, until its removal in 1711 to Crane Court, Fleet Street, had its rooms further east, at Gresham College. Physicians, therefore, and philosophers, as well as the clergy, used 'Child's' as a convenient place of resort.] [Footnote 8: The 'Postman', established and edited by M. Fonvive, a learned and grave French Protestant, who was said to make £600 a year by it, was a penny paper in the highest repute, Fonvive having secured for his weekly chronicle of foreign news a good correspondence in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Flanders, Holland. John Dunton, the bookseller, in his 'Life and Errors,' published in 1705, thus characterized the chief newspapers of the day: