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201 Johnson's favorite inn at Oxford, when he stopped at an inn, was The Angel, on the south side of High Street, the greater part of the site of which is occupied by the New Examination Schools. From there he wrote to Mrs. Thrale in 1777: "I have been searching the Library for my Lives [of the Poets] and little have I got." Well knows an humble searcher for Lives in Oxford, of the present time, how little is " got," some days, out of libraries!

There is a fragment of The Angel still remaining at No. 83 High Street.

Wood tells us that the first coffee-house in Oxford was opened in 1650 by " one Jacob, a Jew, at The Angel, in the Parish of St. Peter in the East; and it was, by some who delighted in novelty, drunk." The coffee was drunk, not the house! Lord Eldon tells of a meeting with Johnson in Oxford in 1773, when Lady Eldon, then Mrs. John Scott, poured out for the great lexicographer only fifteen cups of tea. He is known to have consumed, on more occasions than one, over twenty cups at a sitting; and we are told that once, in the Common Room of University College, he "drank off three bottles of port without being the worse of it." How much he was the worse of fifteen or twenty cups of tea is not stated.

According to that indefatigable and usually