'did not rise till past nine, and from that time till eleven did little more than indulge in idle reveries about balloons'; and again, under date of 17th of the same month, that he had conversed upon the subject when dining with Sir Joseph Banks at his club. The opportunity of emulating their continental neighbours was not long in coming to Englishmen, for we read that at a quarter before two o'clock on Wednesday, September 15, 1784, Vincent Lunardi, secretary to the Neapolitan embassy, accompanied by a dog, a cat, and a pigeon, ascended in a balloon from the Artillery Ground in London, in the presence of the Prince of Wales, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and a prodigious concourse of spectators, and descended in a field at Standon, near Ware, in Hertfordshire, shortly before six o'clock the same evening. To him belongs the credit of having been the first to make an aerial ascent in this country. On October 16, in the year following, two Englishmen named respectively Blanchard and Shellon ascended in a balloon from Chelsea, and in the following month Sadler started from Oxford on the first of his aerial voyages. On July 7, 1785, Dr. Jefferies and Mr. Blanchard embarked in a balloon from the heights of Dover Castle, and having crossed the Channel in safety, descended in the forest of Guisnes, in France. In the course of the same year no fewer than twenty successful voyages were made ; and as Walpole, who was then sojourning in London, in writing to Sir Horace Mann, on May 7, observed :— 'Of conversation the chief topic is air balloons. A French girl, daughter of a dancer, has made a voyage into the clouds and nobody has yet broken a neck; so neither good nor harm has hitherto been produced by these enterprises.' The harm however was to come. In July 1785 two Frenchmen ascended in a balloon from Boulogne. While yet at a vast height, the machine suddenly caught fire, and the occupants being thrown out, were dashed to pieces. After the news of this shocking disaster reached England the ballooning craze began to subside and speedily to give way to some other new thing.1 1 Lunardi's First Aerial Voyage, 1784; Turner's Astra Castra; Reynolds's Life and Times, i. 254–259; Walpole's Letters, ed. Cunningham, viii. 451, 493, 505, 511, 512, 550. 185 CHAPTER VI. LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES, TAVERNS, AND CLUBS. Important position held by coffee-houses, taverns, and clubs—Uses of the coffee-houses-Taverns and their votaries-Taverns frequented by Dr. Johnson-Clubs-The spirit of conviviality-The clubs of Queen Anne's time-The October, Scriblerus, and Mug House Clubs-Clubs founded by Dr. Johnson-Cowper and his contribution to the Nonsense Club-Eccentric clubs-The Humbugs' Club-Club-night - Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu and the blue-stockings-Blasphemous clubsMedmenham Abbey and its monks-The Society of Mohawks. THE trio which has been placed at the head of this chapter played a part by no means unimportant in the social life of the capital in the last century. To the first of these resorts, although there was nothing remarkable about them, either externally or internally, people of all ranks and conditions repaired daily at stated hours, not so much with the object of sipping 'the black and bitter drink called coffee,' or the waters of the great mineral springs, as with that of lounging, perusing the news-sheets, writing letters, transcribing verbatim the news of the day, discussing politics, concluding bargains, transacting business, and playing cards. The London coffee-houses may be said to have stood, to a very great extent, in the same relation to the general public of those days as the clubs do to us of modern times; so that a man was sooner asked about the coffee-house he was in the habit of frequenting than his lodging. Appropriately might Juvenal's line, Quicquid agunt homines, have been inscribed above their portals. It was ascertained by a competent authority that before the eighteenth century had completed fifteen years of its course the coffee-houses of the capital numbered nearly two thousand, and that by them and in them, every class, profession, trade, calling, occupation, and shade of political opinion was fully represented.1 The London clergy discussed the latest items of ecclesiastical and university intelligence either at Truby's or at Child's Coffee House, both of which were situated in St. Paul's Churchyard. Army men took counsel together at Old Man's Coffee House, in the vicinity of Charing Cross. Ardent Whig politicians mustered in great force at the St. James's Coffee House, in St. James's Street, or at the Smyrna in Pall Mall. Tory politicians resorted to the Cocoa Tree in St. James's Street or to Ozinda's (touching which John Macky, in an n account he wrote of his 'Journey through England,' observes, ‘a Whig will no more go to the Cocoa Tree or Ozinda's, than a Tory will be seen at the Coffee House of St. James's'). Lawyers conversed upon legal technicalities at Nando's Coffee House, situated at the eastern corner of Inner Temple Lane. Artists resorted to Old Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane. The richer citizens and merchants chatted over the rise and fall of stocks at Lloyd's, Garraway's, or Jonathan's, situated in Change Alley; the former immortalised (in lines sufficiently indicative of the reputation borne by those by whom it was frequented) in Dean Swift's ballad on the infamous South Sea scheme of 1720. Sojourners in London from Scotland generally frequented the British Coffee House. Frenchmen repaired to Giles's. Paymasters, courtiers, and stockjobbers of an inferior class congregated in Old Man's, White's, Tom's, and Littleman's, at which (despite the presence of sharpers and pickpockets) there was playing at piquet and the best of conversation till midnight. At Robins's and Mrs. Rochford's the foreign ambassadors and bankers took financial counsel together. Wits and literary men met either at John's, Child's, Button's, Will's (at the corner of Bow Street), and at a later period at Dolly's Chop House, the Chapter Coffee House in St. Paul's Churchyard, and the Rose by Temple Bar. The 1 Archenholz states that in 1797 there existed several hundred coffeehouses in the neighbourhood of the Royal Exchange alone, and that in them more business was transacted than in the Exchange itself. virtuosi favoured with their presence Don Saltero's Coffee House in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.1 Several of the coffee-houses just mentioned were immortalised by Steele in the first number of the 'Tatler.' 'All accounts of gallantry,' wrote he in the prefatory note indicative of the scope and intent of that journal, 'shall be under the article of White's Chocolate House,' 'poetry was to emanate 'from Will's Coffee House,' learning centred at the Grecian in Devereux Court, while the foreign and domestic news was to be dated from 'St. James's Coffee House.' Addison, too, as he himself has told us, might often have been seen thrusting his head into a round of politicians at Will's, or at other times smoking a pipe at Child's Coffee House in St. Paul's Churchyard, and on Sundays at the St. James's, He also mentions that his face was familiar at the parlour of the Grecian, at the Cocoa Tree, and at Jonathan's; Button's Coffee House he renders memorable as the rendezvous of the Spectator's Club. The modest sum of one penny deposited at the bar of a coffeehouse admitted to a long room, generally on the ground floor, though sometimes upstairs, as in the case of Jonathan's, for example, partitioned off into rows and rows of boxes, separated by a central walk, which were filled from early morning till late at night with men of different sorts and conditions. The regulation price of a dish of coffee or tea was twopence, and this also franked the perusal of the daily journals and the chief periodical publications. Smoking was permitted at all except the aristocratic coffee-houses; regular customers had their own seats, and were of course the objects of special attention from the lady superintendent at the bar and her attendant satellites. Letters could be written at the coffee-houses, and addressed to correspondents at them; indeed most of the letters printed in the newspapers will be found to bear the name of one. When Moritz, a Prussian traveller, was sojourning here, in 1782, he relates that he saw a divine hastily pen his Sunday afternoon discourse in a coffee-house.2 But over and above all else the coffee-house was from first to last the great arena of politics. 1 De Archenholz, Picture of England, 1797, pp. 311-5. An Englishman (said Goldsmith, writing about the middle of last century), not satisfied with finding by his own prosperity the contending Powers of Europe properly balanced, desires also to know the precise value of every weight in either scale. To gratify this curiosity a leaf of political instruction is served up every morning with his tea. When our politician has feasted upon this he repairs to a coffee-house in order to ruminate upon what he has read and increase his collection. This fully bears out Addison's humorous testimony of nearly forty years previously, when he gave an account, in the pages of the 'Spectator,' of his ramble through the parishes of London and Westminster, visiting the coffee-houses situated in each, with the object of making himself acquainted with the opinions of 'their particular statesmen' on the current report of the French king's death. Addison's special coffee-house was 'Button's,' which was situated in Russell Street, Covent Garden, whereunto was affixed a letter-box, in form resembling ‘a most wide and voracious mouth of a lion's head, in imitation of those in Venice,' through which he requested that all contributions intended for publication in the pages of the 'Guardian' might be dropped. The proprietor of this coffee-house had been at one period of his life in the service of the Dowager Countess of Warwick, whom Addison married in 1716, and after Button had succeeded in establishing himself in 1712 (mainly through the generosity of Addison), the 'Spectator' transferred his patronage thither in company with Steele, Tickell, Swift, Ambrose Philips, and other kindred spirits. In No. 269 of the 'Spectator,' the author of the amusing De Coverley papers states that he accepted the invitation of Sir Roger de Coverley to smoke a pipe with him over a dish of coffee at 'Squire's,' a coffee-house kept by a certain individual of that name in the neighbourhood of Gray's Inn Gate. This furnishes him with an opportunity for supplying one or two particulars of the interior of a coffee-house : I waited on him (he writes) to the coffee-house, where his venerable figure drew upon us the eyes of the whole room. He had no sooner seated himself at the upper end of the high table but he called for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a wax candle, and the Supplement, with such an air of cheerfulness and goodhumour that all the boys in the coffee-room (who seemed to take a |