[250] Lilly, the astrologer, in his memoirs, notes that Thomas
Howard, Earl of Arundel (the famous collector of the Arundelian
marbles now at Oxford), "brought over the new way of building with
brick in the city, greatly to the safety of the city, and
preservation of the wood of this nation."

[251] This proclamation "for the suppression of coffee-houses" bears
date December 20, 1675, and is stated to have been issued because
"the multitude of coffee-houses, lately set up and kept within this
kingdom, and the great resort of idle and dissipated persons to
them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects," particularly
in spreading of rumours, and inducing tradesmen to neglect their
calling, tending to the danger of the commonweal, by the idle waste
of time and money. It therefore orders all coffee-house keepers
"that they, or any of them, do not presume from and after the tenth
day of January next ensuing, to keep any publick coffee-house, or
utter, or sell by retail, in his, her, or their house, or houses (to
be spent or consumed within the same), any coffee, chocolate,
sherbett, or tea; as they will answer it at their utmost peril."

TRUE SOURCES OF SECRET HISTORY.

This is a subject which has been hitherto but imperfectly comprehended
even by some historians themselves; and has too often incurred the
satire, and even the contempt, of those volatile spirits who play about
the superficies of truth, wanting the industry to view it on more than
one side, and those superficial readers who imagine that every tale is
told when it is written.

Secret history is the supplement of history itself, and is its great
corrector; and the combination of secret with public history has in
itself a perfection, which each taken separately has not. The popular
historian composes a plausible rather than an accurate tale; researches
too fully detailed would injure the just proportions, or crowd the bold
design, of the elegant narrative; and facts, presented as they occurred,
would not adapt themselves to those theoretical writers of history who
arrange events not in a natural, but in a systematic order. But in
secret history we are more busied in observing what passes than in being
told of it. We are transformed into the contemporaries of the writers,
while we are standing on the "vantage ground" of their posterity; and
thus what to them appeared ambiguous, to u