king it best to return before bloodshed was
committed, asked Apollo to yoke his team again, and drive them home, which
he readily consented to do: that night seemed unusually light to the
inhabitants of the hemisphere, and many learned heads were puzzled to
discover the cause of the phenomenon, but though many explanations were
given, the real reason remained undiscovered to this day--in which I have
the pleasure of laying it before my readers.
REX.
* * * * *
THE GATHERER.
_Early Rising._--It cannot be denied that early rising is conducive both
to the health of the body and the improvement of the mind. It was an
observation of Swift, that he never knew any man come to greatness and
eminence who lay in bed of a morning. Though this observation of an
individual is not received as an universal maxim, it is certain that some
of the most eminent characters which ever existed, accustomed themselves
to early rising. It seems, also, that people in general rose earlier in
former times than now. In the fourteenth century, the shops in Paris were
opened at four in the morning; at present, a shopkeeper is scarcely awake
at seven.[8] The King of France dined at eight in the morning, and retired
to his bedchamber at the same hour in the evening. During the reign of
Henry VIII. fashionable people in England breakfasted at seven in the
morning, and dined at ten in the forenoon. In Elizabeth's time, the
nobility, gentry, and students, dined at eleven in the forenoon, and
supped between five and six in the afternoon.
SWAINE.
[8] Our correspondent is here somewhat in error: shops in Paris
may be seen _set out_ by seven o'clock in the morning.--ED. M.
* * * * *
_Dick's Coffee-house, Temple Bar_.--The Rev. James Miller wrote a comedy,
in the year 1737, entitled "_The Coffee House_." "This piece met with no
kind of success, from a supposition, how just (says Baker,) I cannot
pretend to determine, that Mrs. Yarrow and her daughter, who kept Dick's
coffee-house, near Temple Bar, and were at that time celebrated toasts,
together with several persons who frequented that house, were intended to
be ridiculed by the author. This he absolutely denied as being his
intention; when the piece came out, however, the engraver who had been
employed to compose a frontispiece, having inadvertently fixed on that
very coffee-house for the scene of his drawing, th
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