little committee of politics in the inner
room as one who comes there to hear and improve. My face is
likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, and in the
theatres both of Drury Lane and the Hay Market. I have been taken
for a merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years, and
sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock jobbers at
Jonathan's; in short, wherever I see a cluster of people, I always
mix with them, though I never open my lips, but in my own club.

In the second number he tells that:

I am now settled with a widow woman, who has a great many children
and complies with my humor in everything. I do not remember that we
have exchanged a word together for these five years; my coffee
comes into my chamber every morning without asking for it, if I
want fire I point to the chimney, if water, to my basin; upon which
my landlady nods as much as to say she takes my meaning, and
immediately obeys my signals.

Three of Addison's papers in the _Spectator_ (Nos. 402, 481, and 568)
are humorously descriptive of the coffee houses of the period. No. 403
opens with the remark that:

The courts of two countries do not so much differ from one another,
as the Court and the City, in their peculiar ways of life and
conversation. In short, the inhabitants of St. James,
notwithstanding they live under the same laws, and speak the same
language, are a distinct people from those of Cheapside, who are
likewise removed from those of the Temple on the one side, and
those of Smithfleld on the other, by several climates and degrees
in their way of thinking and conversing together.

For this reason, the author takes a ramble through London and
Westminster, to gather the opinions of his ingenious countrymen upon a
current report of the king of France's death.

I know the faces of all the principal politicians within the bills
of mortality; and as every coffee-house has some particular
statesman belonging to it, who is the mouth of the street where he
lives, I always take care to place myself near him, in order to
know his judgment on the present posture of affairs. And, as I
foresaw the above report would produce a new face of things in
Europe, and many curious speculations in our British coffee-houses,
I was very desirous to learn the thoughts of our most emin