the wind. There were no police, and in the watchmen who patrolled the streets the public had no confidence.
"Prepare for death if e'er at night you roam,
And sign your will before you pass from home,"
sang Johnson in a period even later than this.
If, with a wave of philanthropy, hospitals were rising into prominence, coffee-houses, chocolate-houses, taverns, and clubs were increasing almost daily. To them flocked all the wit and fashion of London as before, but a pernicious beverage had recently been added, and the wholesale distribution of gin, that "curse of English life," made the early Hanoverian age one of the most drunken on record.
"As the English," says a contemporary writer, "returning from the wars in the Holy Land brought the foul disease of leprosy, so in our fathers' days the English returning from the service in the Netherlands brought with them the foul vice of drunkenness."
Though our forefathers had drunk heavily of beers and wines in the days of the Restoration, the introduction of coffee had diminished this to some extent Throughout the reign of Anne, the
