[Footnote 180:  I discovered the present in a very scarce collection, entitled “Wit and Drollery,” 1661; an edition, however, which is not the earliest of this once fashionable miscellany.]

[Footnote 181:  Harman, in his curious “Caveat, a warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabones,” 1566, describes the “Abraham Man” as a pretended lunatic, who wandered the country over, soliciting food or charity at farm-houses, or frightening and bullying the peasantry for the same.  They described themselves as cruelly treated in Bedlam, and nearly in the words of Shakspeare’s Edgar.]

[Footnote 182:  Dr. James, the translator of “Pauli’s Treatise on Tea,” 1746, says:  “According to the Chinese, tea produces an appetite after hunger and thirst are satisfied; therefore, the drinking of it is to be abstained from.”  He concludes his treatise by saying:  “As Hippocrates spared no pains to remove and root out the Athenian plague, so have I used the utmost of my endeavours to destroy the raging epidemical madness of importing tea into Europe from China.”]

[Footnote 183:  Edinburgh Review, 1816, p. 117.]

[Footnote 184:  Modern collectors have gone beyond this, and exhibited “Elizabethan tea-pots,” which are just as likely to be true.  There is no clear proof of the use of tea in England before the middle of the seventeenth century.  This ante-dating of curiosities is the weakness of collectors.]

[Footnote 185:  Aubrey, speaking of this house, then in other hands, says that Bowman’s Coffee-house in St. Michael’s Alley, established 1652, was the first opened in London.  About four years afterwards, James Farr, a barber, opened another in Fleet-street, by the Inner Temple gate.  Hatton, in his “New View of London,” 1708, says it is “now the Rainbow,” and he narrates how Farr “was presented by the Inquest of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, for making and selling a sort of liquor called coffee, as a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighbourhood.”  The words of the presentment are, that “in making the same he annoyeth his neighbours by evill smells.”  Hatton adds, with naivete, “Who would then have thought London would ever have had near 3000 such nuisances, and that coffee would have been (as now) so much drank by the best of quality and physicians.”  It is, however, proper to note that coffee-houses had been opened in Oxford at an earlier date.  Anthony Wood informs us that one Jacob, a Jew, opened a coffee-house in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-East, at Oxford, as early as 1650.]

[Footnote 186:  This witty poet was not without a degree of prescience; the luxury of eating spiders has never indeed become “modish,” but Mons. Lalande, the French astronomer, and one or two humble imitators of the modern philosopher, have shown this triumph over vulgar prejudices, and were epicures of this stamp.]

[Footnote 187:  “Not only tea, which we have from the East, but also chocolate, which is imported from the West Indies, begins to be famous.”—­Dr. James’s “Treatise on Tobacco, Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate.” 1746.]