dam greeted each other; and Popish coffee-houses,
where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned over their
cups another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King.

Ned Ward gives us this picture of the coffee house of the seventeenth
century. He is describing Old Man's, Scotland Yard:

We now ascended a pair of stairs, which brought us into an
old-fashioned room, where a gaudy crowd of odoriferous Tom-Essences
were walking backwards and forwards, with their hats in their
hands, not daring to convert them to their intended use lest it
should put the foretops of their wigs into some disorder. We
squeezed through till we got to the end of the room, where, at a
small table, we sat down, and observed that it was as great a
rarity to hear anybody call for a dish of politicians porridge, or
any other liquor, as it is to hear a beau call for a pipe of
tobacco; their whole exercise being to charge and discharge their
nostrils and keep the curls of their periwigs in their proper
order. The clashing of their snush-box lids, in opening and
shutting, made more noise than their tongues. Bows and cringes of
the newest mode were here exchanged 'twixt friend and friend with
wonderful exactness. They made a humming like so many hornets in a
country chimney, not with their talking, but with their whispering
over their new Minuets and Bories, with the hands in their pockets,
if only freed from their snush-box. We now began to be thoughtful
of a pipe of tobacco, whereupon we ventured to call for some
instruments of evaporation, which were accordingly brought us, but
with such a kind of unwillingness, as if they would much rather
been rid of our company; for their tables were so very neat, and
shined with rubbing like the upper-leathers of an alderman's shoes,
and as brown as the top of a country housewife's cupboard. The
floor was as clean swept as a Sir Courtly's dining room, which made
us look round to see if there were no orders hung up to impose the
forfeiture of so much mop-money upon any person that should spit
out of the chimney-corner. Notwithstanding we wanted an example to
encourage us in our porterly rudeness, we ordered them to light the
wax candle, by which we ignified our pipes and blew about our
whiffs; at which several Sir Foplins drew their fa