mpound, with sugar, vanilla, and other aromatics. The
immoderate use of chocolate in the seventeenth century was considered as
so violent an inflamer of the passions, that Joan. Fran. Rauch published
a treatise against it, and enforced the necessity of forbidding the
_monks_ to drink it; and adds, that if such an interdiction had existed,
that scandal with which that holy order had been branded might have
proved more groundless. This _Disputatio medico-diaetetica de aere et
esculentis, necnon de potu_, Vienna, 1624, is a _rara avis_ among
collectors. This attack on the monks, as well as on chocolate, is said
to be the cause of its scarcity; for we are told that they were so
diligent in suppressing this treatise, that it is supposed not a dozen
copies exist. We had chocolate-houses in London long after
coffee-houses; they seemed to have associated something more elegant
and refined in their new term when the other had become common.[187]
Roger North thus inveighs against them: "The use of coffee-houses seems
much improved by a new invention, called chocolate-houses, for the
benefit of rooks and cullies of quality, where gaming is added to all
the rest, and the summons of W---- seldom fails; as if the devil had
erected a new university, and those were the colleges of its professors,
as well as his schools of discipline." Roger North, a high Tory, and
Attorney-General to James the Second, observed, however, these
rendezvous were often not entirely composed of those "factious gentry he
so much dreaded;" for he says "This way of passing time might have been
stopped at first, before people had possessed themselves of some
convenience from them of meeting for short despatches, and passing
evenings with small expenses." And old Aubrey, the small Boswell of his
day, attributes his general acquaintance to "the modern advantage of
coffee-houses in this great city, before which men knew not how to be
acquainted, but with their own relations, and societies;" a curious
statement, which proves the moral connexion with society of all
sedentary recreations which induce the herding spirit.

CHARLES THE FIRST'S LOVE OF THE FINE ARTS.

Herbert, the faithful attendant of Charles the First during the two last
years of the king's life, mentions "a diamond seal with the king's arms
engraved on it." The history of this "diamond seal" is remarkable; and
seems to have been recovered by the conjectural sagacity of Warburton,
who never exe