Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 213, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1920 — Famous Meeting Places. [ARTICLE]

Famous Meeting Places.

Periodical gatherings of men with a common object in view go back to ancient history, for man is gregarious, likes to meet with his fellows to air his own opinions and to become acquainted with the views of others. It was in England that such meetings were first designated by the name of “dub” when wits, writers and actors met “good thoughts to exchange." Should you ever walk along Cheapside in London you will see between Friday street and Bread street the spot whereon once stood the famous Mermaid tavern, where Ben Jonson founded his dub, numbering among its members sxAh great lights as Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher. Brilliant must have been the flashes of wit that scintllated within those walls. There is also the famous Will’s coffee house, a favorite resort of Dryden and other literary menof the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When they began to sell “tea in the leaf and drink” in those rendezvous of refreshments, the Englishman must truly have come into his own, for who so devoted to that amher beverage as the sons of Jdm Built ■ ...