writes Defoe, "the best company generally go to Tom's
and Will's coffee houses, near adjoining, where there is playing at
picquet and the best of conversation till midnight. Here you will see
blue and green ribbons and stars sitting familiarly and talking with the
same freedom as if they had left their equality and degrees of distance
at home."

[Illustration: THE LION'S HEAD AT BUTTON'S COFFEE HOUSE

Designed by Hogarth, and put up by Addison, 1713 From a water color by
T.H. Shepherd]

Before entering the coffee house every one was recommended by the
_Tatler_ to prepare his body with three dishes of bohea and to purge his
brains with two pinches of snuff. Men had their coffee houses as now
they have their clubs--sometimes contented with one, sometimes belonging
to three or four. Johnson, for instance, was connected with St. James's,
the Turk's Head, the Bedford, Peele's, besides the taverns which he
frequented. Addison and Steele used Button's; Swift, Button's, the
Smyrna, and St. James's; Dryden, Will's; Pope, Will's and Button's;
Goldsmith, the St. James's and the Chapter; Fielding, the Bedford;
Hogarth, the Bedford and Slaughter's; Sheridan, the Piazza; Thurlow,
Nando's.

_Some Famous Coffee Houses_

Among the famous English coffee houses of the seventeenth-eighteenth
century period were St. James's, Will's, Garraway's, White's,
Slaughter's, the Grecian, Button's, Lloyd's, Tom's, and Don Saltero's.

St. James's was a Whig house frequented by members of Parliament, with a
fair sprinkling of literary stars. Garraway's catered to the gentry of
the period, many of whom naturally had Tory proclivities.

One of the notable coffee houses of Queen Anne's reign was Button's.
Here Addison could be found almost every afternoon and evening, along
with Steele, Davenant, Carey, Philips, and other kindred minds. Pope was
a member of the same coffee house club for a year, but his inborn
irascibility eventually led him to drop out of it.

At Button's a lion's head, designed by Hogarth after the Lion of Venice,
"a proper emblem of knowledge and action, being all head and paws," was
set up to receive letters and papers for the _Guardian_.[82] The
_Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ were born in the coffee house, and probably
English prose would never have received the impetus given it by the
essays of Addison and Steele had it not been for coffee house
associations.

Pope's famous _Rape of the Lock_ grew out of coffee-house goss