and joined the gods) that Vulcan had netted Mars’s cash as well as himself.  Mars rose in a great rage, when Jupiter recommended him not to be nettled, which only made him ten times more so.  A quarrel was the consequence; and Jupiter thinking 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, 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 even extended their resentment to every thing which was suspected to be this author’s, for a considerable time after.”