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The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 556, July 7, 1832 by Various
page 53 of 56 (94%)
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, the Templars, with whom
the abovementioned ladies were great favourites, became, by this accident,
so confirmed in their suspicions, that they united to damn the piece, and
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