hundred years ago. There is no library to the
inn. There were a few books, but being
useless, they were disposed of. The inn had once
a pew in the parish church, but shared the fate
of other learned but little societies in this
respect, and was deprived of that facility for
public worship after a contest involving
considerable expense.

"With regard to Furnival's Inn, we find no
record of separate evidence having been
received; but Mr. Michael Doyle, steward of
Lincoln's Inn, stated that the latter society
received five hundred and seventy-six pounds a
year for the lease of the former property, granted
to the late Henry Peto, for ninety-nine years—
five hundred pounds for rent, and seventy-six
pounds in lieu of land tax. How Furnival's Inn
was acquired by Lincoln's Inn he was unable to
state.

The above is the substance of all that has
been officially set forth concerning the little
inns of court, and their connexion with the
large ones, or inns of court proper. Their
origin, as may be seen, is involved in obscurity,
and their association with the offices of legal
education has long ceased to exist. Originally
they seem to have held a position in reference
to the great societies analogous to that of the
halls or hostels of the universities. But the
machinery has outlived the purpose for which it
was devised. It is notable that the representatives
of the little inns all plead poverty on the part
of those they represent, and, judging from
appearances, there is no reason to suppose that
much money is made from the rent of the
chambers, or even from the mild fees which are
occasionally mentioned. And in any case such
matters seem to concern nobody but those
connected with the societies, who claim to
administer private property, and may be
allowed, we suppose, to administer it in their
own way.

If they like to call themselves principals,
ancients, commoners, companions, or what not,
to dine together in halls, and to cling on to
forms which have no practical meaning, who
shall interfere with their innocent enjoyments?
These enjoyments, and these only, it seems the
aim of their representatives to defend; for the
little inns make no pretence in these days to
meddle with legal education, and it is only in
connexion with their former functions that they
are liable to incur present ridicule. There is
no reason, therefore, why they should not
flourish as they seem to do, and their dignitaries
revel in the delight of governing something
which is so dear to Englishmen whose boast is
that they govern themselves. They at least let
chambers to persons who are very glad of the
accommodation; and if they can gain personal
importance from such useful functions the
public, at least, have no right to complain.
Success, then, we say, to their dinners in hall,
and their assumption of any styles and titles
they may think proper. One of these days the
little inns generally—like that of Lyons—will
probably be improved off the face of the earth.
But pending their fate in the future, we may at
least give them credit for possessing some
usefulness in the present, and some interest in
connexion with the past.

LEAVES FROM THE MAHOGANY TREE.

A CUP OF COFFEE.

A FRENCH gastronomic writer of 1810 has
left us a eulogy on coffee, which only a real lover
of the berry could have penned. "It is," he
writes, "a beverage eminently agreeable, inspiring,
and wholesome; it is at once a stimulant,
a cephalic, a febrifuge, a digestive, and an
anti-soporific; it chases away sleep, which is the
enemy of labour; it invokes the imagination,
without which there can be no happy inspirations;
it expels the gout, that enemy of pleasure,
although to pleasure gout owes its birth;
it facilitates digestion, without which there can
be no true happiness; it disposes to gaiety, without
which there is neither pleasure nor enjoyment;
it gives wit to those who already have it,
and it even provides wit (for some hours at least)
to those who usually have it not. Thank Heaven
for coffee, for see how many blessings are
concentrated in the infusion of a small berry! What
other beverage in the world can we compare to
it? Coffee at once a pleasure and a medicine
—coffee which nourishes at the same moment,
the mind, body, and imagination. Hail to thee,
inspirer of men of letters, best digestive of the
gourmand—nectar of all men!"

When wondering what Frenchmen did before
coffee, we must remember that tea in England,
and coffee in France, only superseded long
established and long venerated herb drinks and
ptisanes, also in their way refreshing, restoring, and
anti-narcotic:—just as tobacco only superseded,
by its superior potency and excellence, herbs
long before smoked, or taken as snuff, in Europe.

The old Arabian legend of coffee runs thus.
Some centuries before the Norman Conquest, a
certain Arab shepherd watching his sheep on
one of the green hills near Mocha (a port on
the Red Sea, near the heights of Bab-el-Mandeb)
which slope down towards the yellow desert,
being wakeful for fear of the lions, observed
that those of his sheep that fed on the shiny
leaves and brown split berries of a certain bush,
also remained all night wakeful, lively, and alert.
The shepherd, watching again and again, and
always observing the same effect, steeped some
of the berries in water, and found they had the
same effect upon him. Gradually (the laws of
patents being then rather unsettled), the secret
spread into the desert, and the new drink,
cavy or cavey, became popular in the black
tents of the wandering Ishmaelite.

In time, much as tea had been first used
to drive away wicked sleep from the eyes of
Chinese hermits, coffee became used by the
holy men of Arabia and Egypt. There also
arose a very hot and disagreeable controversy
in the Mosques, whether coffee came under
the ban pronounced by Mahomet against
certain liquors, especially wine. The Cairo
Mullahs fell a wrangling about this point of