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While all the coffeehouses were unanimously resolving that a fleet and army ought to have been long before sent to Dublin, and wondering how so renowned a politician as his Majesty could have been duped by Hamilton and Tyrconnel, a gentleman went down to the Temple Stairs, called a boat, and desired to be pulled to Greenwich.
"I believe there is some humour in it," Mr. Waverton conceded grandly. "Well, they have tracked him down. Our gentleman lies at a filthy tavern in the Long Acre. The 'Leg of Pork, or some such lewd name. He haunts Jacobite coffeehouses and the like low places. They believe that he makes some dirty money by scribbling for the Press. A writer in the newspapers! He is sunk almost to his right depth.
In a single generation nearly two thousand public coffeehouses, each a center of sociability, sprang up in London alone, and the number of private clubs is quite as astonishing. This new social life had a marked effect in polishing men's words and manners.
I related what had passed to Fouche, who told me that, wishing to amuse himself at Junot's expense, whose police agents only picked up what they heard related in coffeehouses, gaming-houses, and the Bourse, he had given currency to this absurd story, which Junot had credited and reported, as he did many other foolish tales.
There the Court Martial met on board of a frigate named the Kent. The investigation lasted three days; and during those days the ferment was great in London. Nothing was heard of on the exchange, in the coffeehouses, nay even at the church doors, but Torrington.
Twenty ships were burned or taken in the Port of Redondilla, and a vast deal more plunder than was ever accounted for; but poor men before that expedition were rich afterwards, and so often was it found and remarked that the Vigo officers came home with pockets full of money, that the notorious Jack Shafto, who made such a figure at the coffeehouses and gaming-tables in London, and gave out that he had been a soldier at Vigo, owned, when he was about to be hanged, that Bagshot Heath had been HIS Vigo, and that he only spoke of La Redondilla to turn away people's eyes from the real place where the booty lay.
To this request he acceded; and thenceforth the government of the whole island was in his hands. The decisive moment approached; and the agitation of the public mind rose to the height. Knots of politicians were everywhere whispering and consulting. The coffeehouses were in a ferment. The presses of the capital never rested.
Playhouses, coffeehouses, and taverns were the scenes of their rendezvous. Wit and humour were the entertainment of their looser hours, and love was the business of their more serious moments.
Let me name one incident by way of proof the well-known one of Partridge, the almanac-maker. This worthy cobbler was an astrologer of no mean repute. He foretold events with much discretion. The ignorant bought his almanacs, and many believed in them as a Bible in fact, astrology was enjoying a "boom." Swift came to London and found that Partridge's predictions were the theme at the coffeehouses.
Nottingham was always bringing to the closet intelligence of the wild daydreams in which a few old eaters of calf's head, the remains of the once formidable party of Bradshaw and Ireton, still indulged at taverns in the city. Shrewsbury produced ferocious lampoons which the Jacobites dropped every day in the coffeehouses.
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