CupScout

_The romance of coffee, and its influence on the discourse, poetry,
history, drama, philosophic writing, and fiction of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries and on the writers of today–Coffee quips
and anecdotes_

Any study of the literature of coffee comprehends a survey of selections
from the best thought of civilized nations, from the time of Rhazes
(850-922) to Francis Saltus. We have seen in chapter III how Rhazes, the
physician-philosopher, appears to have been the first writer to mention
coffee; and was followed by other great physicians, like Bengiazlah, a
contemporary, and Avicenna (980-1037).

Then arose many legends about coffee, that served as inspiration for
Arabian, French, Italian, and English poets.

Sheik Gemaleddin, mufti of Mocha, is said to have discovered the virtues
of coffee about 1454, and to have promoted the use of the drink in
Arabia. Knowledge of the new beverage was given to Europeans by the
botanists Rauwolf and Alpini toward the close of the sixteenth century.

The first authentic account of the origin of coffee was written by
Abd-al-Kâdir in 1587. It is the famous Arabian manuscript commending the
use of coffee, preserved in the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, and
catalogued as “Arabe, 4590.”

Its title written in Arabic is as follows:

[Arabic]
___ ___ ___ ___
4 3 2 1

which is pronounced (reading right to left):

omdat as safwa fi hall al kahwa
___ ___ ___ _____
1 2 3 4

or; in the literary style: omdatu s safwati fi hallu ‘l kahwati which
means–literally, (the corresponding words being underlined and
numbered)

“The maintenance of purity as
___________ ______
1 2
regards the legitimacy of coffee.”
_________ ______
3 4

or, more freely, “Argument in favor of the legitimate use of coffee.”

[Arabic] kahwa, is the Arabic word for coffee.

The author is Abd-al-Kâdir ibn Mohammad al Ansâri al Jazari al Hanbali.
That is, he was named Abd-al-Kâdir, son of Mohammed.

_Abd-al-Kâdir_ means “slave of the strong one” (i.e., of God); while _al
Ansâri_ means that he was a descendant of the _Ansâri_ (i.e., “helpers”),
the people of Medina who received and protected the Prophet Mohammed
after his flight from Mecca; _al Jazari_ means that he was a man of
Mesopotamia; and _al Hanbali_ that in law and theology he belonged to
the well known sect, or school, of the Hanbalites, so called after the
great jurist and writer, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died at Bagdad A.H. 241
(A.D. 855). The Hanbalites are one of the four great sects of the Sunni
Mohammedans.

Abd-al-Kâdir ibn Mohammed lived in the tenth century of the Hegira–the
sixteenth of our era–and wrote his book in 996 A.H., or 1587 A.D.
Coffee had then been in common use since about 1450 A.D. in Arabia. It
was not in use in the time of the Prophet, who died in 632 A.D.; but he
had forbidden the drink of strong liquors which affect the brain, and
hence it was argued that coffee, as a stimulant, was unlawful. Even
today, the community of the Wahabis, very powerful in Arabia a hundred
years ago, and still dominant in part of it, do not permit the use of
coffee.

Abd-al-Kâdir’s book is thought to have been based on an earlier writing
by Shihâb-ad-Dîn Ahmad ibn Abd-al-Ghafâr al Maliki, as he refers to the
latter on the third page of his manuscript; but if so, this previous
work does not appear to have been preserved. La Roque says Shihâb-ad-Dîn
was an Arabian historian who supplied the main part of Abd-al-Kâdir’s
story. La Roque refers also to a Turkish historian.

Research by the author has failed to disclose anything about
Shihâb-ad-Dîn save his name (_al Maliki_ means that he belonged to the
Malikites, another of the four great Sunni sects), and that he wrote
about a hundred years before Abd-al-Kâdir. No copy of his writings is
known to exist.

The illustrations show the title page of Abd-al-Kâdir’s manuscript, the
first page, the third page, and the fly leaf of the cover, the latter
containing an inscription in Latin made at the time the manuscript was
first received or classified. It reads:

Omdat al safouat fl hall al cahuat.

De usu legitimo et licito potionis quae vulgo Café nuncupatur.
Authore Abdalcader Ben Mohammed al Ansâri. Constat hic liber
capitibus septem, et ab authore editus est anno hegirae 996 quo
anno centum et viginti anni effluxerant ex quo huius potionis usus
in Arabia felice invaluerat

The translation of the Latin is:

Concerning the legitimate and lawful use of the drink commonly
known as café by Abdalcader Ben Mohammed al Ansâri. The book is
composed in seven chapters and was brought out by the author in the
year of the Hegira 996 at which time a hundred and twenty years had
passed since the use of this drink had become firmly established in
Arabia Felix.

_Coffee in Poetry_

The Abd-al-Kâdir work immortalized coffee. It is in seven chapters. The
first treats of the etymology and significance of the word cahouah
(kahwa), the nature and properties of the bean, where the drink was
first used, and describes its virtues. The other chapters have to do
largely with the church dispute in Mecca in 1511, answer the religious
objectors to coffee, and conclude with a collection of Arabic verses
composed during the Mecca controversy by the best poets of the time.

De Nointel, ambassador from the court of Louis XIV to the Ottoman Porte,
brought back with him to Paris from Constantinople the Abd-al-Kâdir
manuscript, and another by Bichivili, one of the three general
treasurers of the Ottoman Empire. The latter work is of a later date
than the Abd-al-Kâdir manuscript, and is concerned chiefly with the
history of the introduction of coffee into Egypt, Syria, Damascus,
Aleppo, and Constantinople.

The following are two of the earliest Arabic poems in praise of coffee.
They are about the period of the first coffee persecution in Mecca
(1511), and are typical of the best thought of the day:

IN PRAISE OF COFFEE

_Translation from the Arabic_

O Coffee! Thou dost dispel all cares, thou art the object of desire
to the scholar.

This is the beverage of the friends of God; it gives health to
those in its service who strive after wisdom.

Prepared from the simple shell of the berry, it has the odor of
musk and the color of ink.

The intelligent man who empties these cups of foaming coffee, he
alone knows truth.

May God deprive of this drink the foolish man who condemns it with
incurable obstinacy.

Coffee is our gold. Wherever it is served, one enjoys the society
of the noblest and most generous men.

O drink! As harmless as pure milk, which differs from it only in
its blackness.

Here is another, rhymed version of the same poem:

IN PRAISE OF COFFEE

_Translation from the Arabic_

O coffee! Doved and fragrant drink, thou drivest care away,
The object thou of that man’s wish who studies night and day.
Thou soothest him, thou giv’st him health, and God doth favor those
Who walk straight on in wisdom’s way, nor seek their own repose.
Fragrant as musk thy berry is, yet black as ink in sooth!
And he who sips thy fragrant cup can only know the truth.
Insensate they who, tasting not, yet vilify its use;
For when they thirst and seek its help, God will the gift refuse.
Oh, coffee is our wealth! for see, where’er on earth it grows,
Men live whose aims are noble, true virtues who disclose.

COFFEE COMPANIONSHIP

_Translation from the Arabic_

Come and enjoy the company of coffee in the places of its
habitation; for the Divine Goodness envelops those who partake of
its feast.

There the elegance of the rugs, the sweetness of life, the society
of the guests, all give a picture of the abode of the blest.

It is a wine which no sorrow could resist when the cup-bearer
presents thee with the cup which contains it.

It is not long since Aden saw thy birth. If thou doubtest this, see
the freshness of youth shining on the faces of thy children.

Grief is not found within its habitations. Trouble yields humbly to
its power.

It is the beverage of the children of God, it is the source of
health.

It is the stream in which we wash away our sorrows. It is the fire
which consumes our griefs.

Whoever has once known the chafing-dish which prepares this
beverage, will feel only aversion for wine and liquor from casks.

Delicious beverage, its color is the seal of its purity.

Reason pronounces favorably on the lawfulness of it.

Drink of it confidently, and give not ear to the speech of the
foolish, who condemn it without reason.

During the period of the second religious persecution of coffee in the
latter part of the sixteenth century, other Arabian poets sang the
praises of coffee. The learned Fakr-Eddin-Aboubeckr ben Abid Iesi wrote
a book entitled _The Triumph of Coffee_, and the poet-sheikh
Sherif-Eddin-Omar-ben-Faredh sang of it in harmonious verse, wherein,
discoursing of his mistress, he could find no more flattering comparison
than coffee. He exclaims, “She has made me drink, in long draughts, the
fever, or, rather, the coffee of love!”

The numerous contributions by early travelers to the literature of
coffee have been mentioned in chronological order in the history
chapters. After Rauwolf and Alpini, there were Sir Antony Sherley,
Parry, Biddulph, Captain John Smith, Sir George Sandys, Sir Thomas
Herbert, and Sir Henry Blount in England; Tavernier, Thévenot, Bernier,
P. de la Roque, and Galland in France; Delia Valle in Italy; Olearius
and Niebhur in Germany; Nieuhoff in Holland, and others.

Francis Bacon wrote about coffee in his _Hist. Vitae et Mortis_ and
_Sylva Sylvarum_, 1623-27. Burton referred to it in his “_Anatomy of
Melancholy_” in 1632. Parkinson described it in his _Theatrum Botanicum_
in 1640. In 1652, Pasqua Rosée published his famous handbill in London,
a literary effort as well as a splendid first advertisement.

Faustus Nairon (Banesius) produced in Rome, in 1671, the first printed
treatise devoted solely to coffee. The same year Dufour brought out the
first treatise in French. This he followed in 1684 with his work, _The
manner of making coffee, tea, and chocolate_. John Ray extolled the
virtues of coffee in his _Universal Botany of Plants_, published in
London in 1686. Galland translated the Abd-al-Kâdir manuscript into
French in 1699, and Jean La Roque published his _Voyage de l’Arabie
Heureuse_ in Paris in 1715. Excerpts from nearly all these works appear
in various chapters of this work.

Leonardus Ferdinandus Meisner published a Latin treatise on coffee, tea,
and chocolate in 1721. Dr. James Douglas published in London (1727) his
_Arbor yemensis fructum cofè ferens, or a description and history of the
Coffee Tree_. This work laid under contribution many of the Italian,
German, French, and English scholars mentioned above; and the author
mentioned as other sources of information: Dr. Quincy, Pechey, Gaudron,
de Fontenelle, Professor Boerhaave, Figueroa, Chabraeus, Sir Hans
Sloane, Langius, and Du Mont.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the poets and dramatists of
France, Italy, and England found a plentiful supply in what had already
been written on coffee; to say nothing of the inspiration offered by the
drink itself, and by the society of the cafés of the period.

French poets, familiar with Latin, first took coffee as the subject of
their verse. Vaniére sang its praises in the eighth book of his
_Praedium rusticum_; and Fellon, a Jesuit professor of Trinity College,
Lyons, wrote a didactic poem called, _Faba Arabica, Carmen_, which is
included in the _Poemata didascalica_ of d’Olivet.

Abbé Guillaume Massieu’s _Carmen Caffaeum_, composed in 1718, has been
referred to in chapter III. It was read at the Academy of Inscriptions.
One of the panegyrists of this author, de Boze, in his _Elogé de
Massieu_, says that if Horace and Virgil had known of coffee, the poem
might easily have been attributed to them; and Thery, who translated it
into French, says “it is a pearl of elegance in a rare jewel case.”

The following translation of the poem from the Latin original was made
for this work:

COFFEE

_A Poem by Guillaume Massieu of the French Academy_

(A literal prose translation from the original Latin in the British
Museum.)

How coffee first came to our shores,
What the nature of the divine drink is, what its use,
How it brings ready aid to man against every kind of evils,
I shall here begin to tell in simple verse.

You soft-spoken men, who have often tried the sweetness of this drink,
If it has never deceived your wishes or mocked your hopes
With its empty results, be propitious and lend a willing ear to our song.
And may you, O Phoebus, kindly be present, to acknowledge
As your gift the power of herbs and healthful plants, and to
Dispel sad diseases from our bodies; for they say you are
The author of this blessing, and may you spread your
Gifts among peoples, and everywhere far and wide throughout the entire
world.

Across Libya afar, and the seven mouths of the swollen Nile,
Where Asia most joyfully spreads in immense fields
Rich in various resources and filled with fragrant woods,
A region extends. The Sabeans of old inhabited it.
I believe indeed Nature, that best parent of all things,
Loved this place more than all others with a tender love.
Here the air of Heaven always breathes more mildly.
The sun has a gentler power; here are flowers of a different clime;
And the earth with fertile bosom brings forth various fruits,
Cinnamon, casia, myrrh, and fragrant thyme.
Amid the resources and gifts of this blessed land,
Turned to the sun and the warm south winds,
A tree spontaneously lifts itself into the upper air.
Growing nowhere else, and unknown in earlier centuries,
By no means great in size, it stretches not far its
Spreading branches, nor lifts a lofty top to heaven;
But lowly, after the manner of myrtle or pliant broom,
It rises from the ground. Many a nut bends its rich branches.
Small, like a bean, dark and dull in color,
Marked by a slight groove in the centre of its hull.

To transplant this growth to our own fields
Many have tried, and to cultivate it with great care.
In vain; for the plant has not responded to the zeal
And desires of the planters, and has rendered vain their long labor;
Before day the root of the tender herb has withered away.
Either this has happened through fault of climate, or grudging
Earth refuses to furnish fit nourishment to the foreign plant.

Therefore come thou, whoever shall be possesed by a love for coffee,
Do not regret having brought the healthful bean from the far
Remote world of Arabia; for this is its bountiful mother country.
The soothing draught first flowed from those regions through other
Peoples; thence through all Europe and Asia,
and next made its way through the entire world.

Therefore, what you shall know to be sufficient for your needs,
Do you prepare long beforehand; let it be your care to have collected
Yearly a copious store, and providently fill small granaries,
As of yore the farmer, early mindful and provident of the future,
Collected crops from his fields and garnered them in his barns,
And turned his attention to the coming year.

None the less, meanwhile, must the utensils for coffee be cared for. Let
not vessels suited for drinking the beverage be lacking, And a pot,
whose narrow neck should be topped by a small cover And whose body
should swell gradually into an oblong shape. When these things shall
have been provided by you, let your Next care be to roast well the beans
with flames, and to grind them when roasted. Nor should the hammer cease
to crush them with many a blow, Until they lay aside their hardness, and
when thoroughly ground, Become fine powder; which forthwith pack either
in a bag or a box made for such uses. And wrap it in leather, and smear
it over with soft wax, lest Narrow chinks be open, or hidden channels.
Unless you prevent these, by a secret path gradually small Particles and
whatever of value exists, and the entire strength, Would leave, wasting
into empty air.

[Illustration: CAMEL TRANSPORT BETWEEN HARAR AND DIRE-DAOUA, ABYSSINIA]

[Illustration: SUN-DRYING IN LA LAGUNA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS]

[Illustration: COFFEE SCENES IN THE NEAR AND THE FAR EAST]

There is also a hollow machine, like a small tower, which they
Call a mill, in which you can bruise the useful fruit of the
Roasted bean and crush it with frequent rubbing;
A revolving pivot in the middle, on an easy wheel turning,
Twists its metal joints on a creaking stem.
The top of the wheel, you know, is pierced with an ivory handle
Which will have to be turned by hand, through a thousand revolutions,
And through a thousand circles it moves the pivot.
When you put a kernel in, you will turn the handle with quick hand–
No delay–and you will wonder how the crackling kernel is
With much grinding quickly reduced to a powder.
Once only the lower compartment receives on its kindly bosom
The crushed grains, which are placed in the very depths of the box.

But why do we linger over these less important matters? Greater things
call us. Then is it time to drain the sweet Draught, either under the
new light of the early sun In the morning, when an empty stomach demands
food; Or, when, after the splendid feasts of a magnificent table The
overburdened stomach suffers from too heavy load, and Unequal to the
demands made upon it, seeks the aid of external heat. Then come, when
now the pot grows ruddy in the fire Crackling beneath, and you shall
behold the liquid, swelling With mingled powdered coffee, now bubble
around the brim, Draw it from the fire. Unless you should do this, the
force of The water would break forth suddenly, overflowing, and would
Sprinkle the beverage on the fire beneath. Therefore, let no such
accident disturb your joys. You should keep watch carefully when the
water no longer Restrains itself and bubbles with the heat; then return
The pot to the fire thrice and four times, until the powdered Coffee
steams in the midst of the fire and blends thoroughly with the
surrounding water.

This soothing drink ought to be boiled with skill, to be drunk With
art–not in the way men are wont to drink other beverages–And with
reason; for when you shall have taken it steaming from A quick fire, and
gradually all the dregs have settled to the Very bottom, you shall not
drink it impatiently at one gulp. But rather, sip it little by little,
and between draughts Contrive pleasant delays; and sipping, drain it in
long draughts, So long as it is still hot and burns the palate. For then
it is better, then it permeates our inmost bones, and Penetrating within
to the center of our vitals and our marrow, It pervades all our body
with its vivifying strength. Often even merely inhaling the odor with
their nostrils, men Have welcomed it, when it has bubbled up from the
bottom, More refreshing than the breeze. So much pleasure is there in a
delicious odor.

And now there remains awaiting us the other part of our task, To make
known the secret strength of the divine draught. But who could hope to
understand this wonderful blessing Or to be able to pursue so great a
miracle in verse? For really, when coffee has quietly glided into your
body, Taking itself within, it sheds a vital warmth through your Limbs,
and inspires joyous strength in your heart. Then if There is anything
undigested, with fire’s help, it heats the Hidden channels, and loosens
the thin pores, through which the Useless moisture exudes, and seeds of
diseases flee from all your veins.

Wherefore come, O you who have a care for your health! You, whose triple
chin hangs on your breast, Who drag your heavy stomach of great bulk, It
is fitting for you, first of all, to indulge in the warm Beverage; for
indeed it will dry the hideous flow of moisture Which oppresses your
limbs, and sends forth streams of perspiration from your whole body. And
in a short time, the swelling of your fat belly will Gradually begin to
decrease, and it will lighten your members, now oppressed by their heavy
weight.

O happy peoples, on whom Titan, rising, looks with his first light!
Here, a rather free use of wine has never done harm. Law and religion
forbid us to quaff the flowing wine. Here one lives on coffee. Here,
then, flourishing with joyous strength One pursues life and knows not
what diseases are, Nor that child of Bacchus and companion of high
living–Gout; Nor what innumerable diseases through this union are ready
to attack our world.

Yet, indeed, the soothing power of this invigorating drink Drives sad
cares from the heart, and exhilarates the spirits. I have seen a man,
when he had not yet drained a mighty Draught of this sweet nectar, walk
silently with slow gait, His brow sad, and forehead rough with
forbidding wrinkles. This same man who had hardly bathed his throat with
the sweet Drink–no delay–clouds fled from his wrinkled brow; and He
took pleasure in teasing all with his witty sayings. Nor yet did he
pursue any one with bitter laughter. For this Harmless drink inspires no
desire of offending, the venom Is lacking, and pleasant laughter without
bitterness pleases.

And in the entire East this custom of coffee drinking Has been accepted.
And, now, France; you adopt the foreign custom, So that public shops,
one after the other, are opened for Drinking Coffee. A hanging sign of
either ivy or laurel invites the passers-by. Hither in crowds from the
entire city they assemble, and While away the time in pleasant drinking.
And when once the feelings have grown warm, acted upon by The gentle
heat, then good-humored laughter, and pleasant Arguments increase.
General gaiety ensues, the places about resound with joyous applause.
But never does the liquid imbibed overpower weary minds, but Rather, if
ever slumber presses their heavy eyes and dulls The brain; and their
strength, blunted, grows torpid in the Body, coffee puts sleep to flight
from the eyes, and slothful inactivity from the whole frame. Therefore
to absorb the sweet draught would be an advantage For those whom a great
deal of long-continued labor awaits And those who need to extend their
study far into the night.

And here I shall make known who taught the use of this pleasant Drink;
for its virtue, unknown, has lain hidden through many Years; and
reviewing, I shall relate the matter from the very beginning.

An Arab shepherd was driving his young goats to the well-known Pastures.
They were wandering through lonely wastes and cropping The grasses, when
a tree heavy with many berries–never seen before–met their eyes. At
once, as they were able to reach the low branches, they began To pull
off the leaves with many a nibble, and to pluck the tender Growth. Its
bitterness attracts. The shepherd, not knowing this, Was meanwhile
singing on the soft grass and telling the story of his loves to the
woods. But when the evening star, rising, warned him to leave the field,
And he led back his well-fed flock to their stalls, he perceived That
the beasts did not close their eyes in sweet sleep, but Joyous beyond
their wont, with wonderful delight throughout the Whole night jumped
about with wanton leaps. Trembling with sudden Fear, the shepherd stood
amazed; and crazed by the sound, he Thought these things were being done
through some wicked trick of a neighbor, or by magic art.

Not far from here a holy band of brethren had built their Humble home in
a remote valley; their lot it was to chant Praises of God, and to load
his altars with fitting gifts. Although throughout the night the
deep-toned bell resounded With great din, and summoned them to the
sacred temple, often The coming of dawn found them lingering on their
couches, Having forgotten to rise in the middle of the night. So great
was their love of sleep!

In charge of the sacred temple, revered and obeyed by his Willing
brethren, was the master, an aged man, a heavy mass of white hair on
head and chin. The shepherd, hastening, came to him and told him the
story, Imploring his aid. The old man smiled to himself; but He agreed
to go, and investigate the hidden cause of the miracle.

When he has come to the hills, he observes the lambs, together With
their mothers, gnawing the berries of an unknown plant, And cries, “This
is the cause of the trouble!” And saying no More, he at once picks the
smooth fruit from the heavily-laden Tree, and carries it home, places
it, when washed, in pure Water, cooking it over the fire, and fearlessly
drinks a large Cup of it. Forthwith a warmth pervades his veins, a
living Force is diffused through his limbs, and weariness is dispelled
from his aged body. Then, at length, the old man exulting in the
blessing thus found, Rejoices, and kindly shares with all his brothers.
They eagerly At early night-fall, indulge in pleasant banquets and drain
great bowls. No longer is it hard for them to break off sweet sleep and
to leave their soft beds as formerly. O fortunate ones! whose hearts the
sweet draught has often Bathed. No sluggish torpor holds their minds,
they briskly Rise for their prescribed duties and rejoice to outstrip
the rays of the first light.

You also, whose care it is to feed minds with divine eloquence And to
terrify with your words the souls of the guilty, you also Should indulge
in the pleasant drink; for, as you know, it Strengthens weakness. Keen
vigor is gained for the limbs from This source, and spreads through the
whole body. From this source, Too, shall come new strength and new power
to your voice. You also, whom oft harmful vapors harass, whose sick
brain the dangerous vertigo shakes, Ah, come! In this sweet liquid is a
ready medicine And none other better to calm undue agitation. Apollo
planted this power for himself, they say, The story is worthy to be
sung.

Once a disease most deadly to life assailed the disciples of Apollo’s
Mount. It spread far and wide, and attacked the brain itself. Already
all the people of genius were suffering with this Disease; and the arts,
deserted, were languishing along with The workers. Some even pretended
to have the disease, and Assuming feigned suffering, gave themselves
over to an idle life. Unpleasing work grew distasteful, and deadly
inertia increased Everywhere. It pleased all, now released from work and
labors, To indulge in care-free quiet. Apollo, full of indignation, did
not endure longer that the deadly Contagion of such easy ruin should
creep over them thus. And, That he might take away from seers all means
of deception, he Enticed from the rich bosom of the earth this friendly
plant, Than which no other is more ready either to refresh for work the
Mind wearied by long studies, or to sooth troublesome sorrows of the
head.

O plant, given to the human race by the gift of the Gods! No other out
of the entire list of plants has ever vied with you. On your account
sailors sail from our shores And fearlessly conquer the threatening
winds, sandbanks and Dreadful rocks. With your nourishing growth you
surpass dittany, Ambrosia, and fragrant panacea. Grim diseases flee from
you. To You trusting health clings as a companion, and also the merry
Crowd, conversation, amusing jokes, and sweet whisperings.

The poet Belighi toward the close of the sixteenth century composed a
poem, which, freely translated, runs:

In Damascus, in Aleppo, in great Cairo,
At every turn is to be found
That mild fruit which gives so beloved a drink,
Before coming to court to triumph.
There this seditious disturber of the world,
Has, by its unparalleled virtue,
Supplanted all wines from this blessed day.

Jacques Delille (1738-1813) the didactic poet of nature, in _chant vi_
of his “_Three Reigns of Nature_,” thus apostrophizes the “divine
nectar” and describes its preparation:

DIVINE COFFEE

_Translation from the French_

A liquid there is to the poet most dear,
‘T was lacking to Virgil, adored by Voltaire,
‘T is thou, divine coffee, for thine is the art,
Without turning the head yet to gladden the heart.
And thus though my palate be dulled by age,
With joy I partake of thy dear beverage.
How glad I prepare me thy nectar most precious,
No soul shall usurp me a rite so delicious;
On the ambient flame when the black charcoal burns,
The gold of thy bean to rare ebony turns,
I alone, ‘gainst the cone, wrought with fierce iron teeth.
Make thy fruitage cry out with its bitter-sweet breath;
Till charmed with such perfume, with care I entrust
To the pot on my hearth the rare spice-laden dust:
First to calm, then excite, till it seethingly whirls,
With an eye all attention I gaze till it boils.
At last now the liquid comes slow to repose;
In the hot, smoking vessel its wealth I depose,
My cup and thy nectar; from wild reeds expressed,
America’s honey my table has blest;
All is ready; Japan’s gay enamel invites–
And the tribute of two worlds thy prestige unites:
Come, Nectar divine, inspire thou me,
I wish but Antigone, dessert and thee;
For scarce have I tasted thy odorous steam,
When quick from thy clime, soothing warmths round me stream,
Attentive my thoughts rise and flow light as air,
Awaking my senses and soothing my care.
Ideas that but late moved so dull and depressed,
Behold, they come smiling in rich garments dressed!
Some genius awakes me, my course is begun;
For I drink with each drop a bright ray of the sun.

Maumenet addressed to Galland the following verses:

If slumber, friend, too near, with some late glass should creep–
Dull, poppy-perfumed sleep–
If a too fumous wine confounds at length thy brain–
Take coffee then–this juice divine
Shall banish sleep and steam of vap’rous wine,
And with its timely aid fresh vigor thou shalt find.

Castel, in his poem, _Les Plantes_ (The Plants) could not omit the
coffee trees of the tropics. He thus addressed them in 1811:

Bright plants, the favorites of Phoebus,
In these climes the rarest virtues offer,
Delicious Mocha, thy sap, enchantress,
Awakens genius, outvalues Parnasse!

In a collection of the _Songs of Brittany_ in the Brest library there
are many stanzas in praise of coffee. A Breton poet has composed a
little piece of ninety-six verses in which he describes the powerful
attraction that coffee has for women and the possible effects on
domestic happiness. The first time that coffee was used in Brittany,
says an old song of that country, only the nobility drank it, and now
all the common people are using it, yet the greater part of them have
not even bread.

A French poet of the eighteenth century produced the following:

LINES ON COFFEE

_Translation from the French_

Good coffee is more than a savory cup,
Its aroma has power to dry liquor up.
By coffee you get upon leaving the table
A mind full of wisdom, thoughts lucid, nerves stable;
And odd tho’ it be, ‘t is none the less true,
Coffee’s aid to digestion permits dining anew.
And what ‘s very true, tho’ few people know it,
Fine coffee ‘s the basis of every fine poet;
For many a writer as windy as Boreas
Has been vastly improved by the drink ever glorious.
Coffee brightens the dullness of heavy philosophy,
And opens the science of mighty geometry.
Our law-makers, too, when the nectar imbibing,
Plan wondrous reforms, quite beyond the describing;
The odor of coffee they delight in inhaling,
And promise the country to alter laws ailing.
From the brow of the scholar coffee chases the wrinkles,
And mirth in his eyes like a firefly twinkles;
And he, who before was but a hack of old Homer,
Becomes an original, and that ‘s no misnomer.
Observe the astronomer who ‘s straining his eyes
In watching the planets which soar thro’ the skies;
Alas, all those bright bodies seem hopelessly far
Till coffee discloses his own guiding star.
But greatest of wonders that coffee effects
Is to aid the news-editor as he little expects;
Coffee whispers the secrets of hidden diplomacy,
Hints rumors of wars and of scandals so racy.
Inspiration by coffee must be nigh unto magic,
For it conjures up facts that are certainly tragic;
And for a few pennies, coffee’s small price per cup,
“Ye editor’s” able to swallow the Universe up.

Esménard celebrated Captain de Clieu’s romantic voyage to Martinique
with the coffee plants from the Jardin des Plantes, in some admirable
verses quoted in chapter II.

Among other notable poetic flights in praise of coffee produced in
France mention should be made of: “_L’Elogé du Café_” (Eulogy of Coffee)
a song in twenty-four couplets, Paris, Jacques Estienne, 1711; _Le Café_
(Coffee), a fragment from the fourth _chant_ (song) of _La Grandeur de
Dieu dans les merveilles de la Nature_ (The Grandeur of God in the
Wonders of Nature) Marseilles; _Le Café_, extract from the fourth
gastronomic song, by Berchoux; “_A Mon Café_” (To My Coffee), stanzas
written by Ducis; _Le Café_, anonymous stanzas inserted in the
_Macedoine Poetique_, 1824; a poem in Latin in the Abbé Olivier’s
collection; _Le Bouquet Blanc et le Bouquet Noir, poesie en quatre
chants; Le Café_, C.D. Mery, 1837; _Elogé du Café_, S. Melaye, 1852.

Many Italian poets have sung the praises of coffee. L. Barotti wrote his
poem, _Il Caffè_ in 1681. Giuseppe Parini (1729-1799), Italy’s great
satirical and lyric poet and critic of the eighteenth century, in _Il
Giorno_ (_The Day_), gives a delightful pen picture of the manners and
customs of Milan’s polite society of the period. William Dean Howells
quotes as follows from these poems (his own translation) in his _Modern
Italian Poets_. The feast is over, and the lady signals to the cavalier
that it is time to leave the table:

Spring to thy feet
The first of all, and, drawing near thy lady,
Remove her chair and offer her thy hand,
And lead her to the other room, nor suffer longer
That the stale reek of viands shall offend
Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites
The grateful odor of the coffee, where
It smokes upon a smaller table hid
And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums
That meanwhile burn, sweeten and purify
The heavy atmosphere, and banish thence
All lingering traces of the feast. Ye sick
And poor, whom misery or whom hope, perchance!
Has guided in the noonday to these doors.
Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng,
With mutilated limbs and squalid faces,
In litters and on crutches from afar
Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils
Drink in the nectar of the feast divine
That favourable zephyrs waft to you;
But do not dare besiege these noble precincts,
Importunately offering her that reigns
Within your loathsome spectacle of woe!
And now, sir, ‘t is your office to prepare
The tiny cup that then shall minister,
Slow sipped, its liquor to thy lady’s lips;
And now bethink thee whether she prefer
The boiling beverage much or little tempered
With sweet; or if, perchance, she likes it best,
As doth the barbarous spouse, then when she sits
Upon brocades of Persia, with light fingers,
The bearded visage of her lord caressing.

This is from _Il Mezzogiorno_ (_Noon_). The other three poems, rounding
out _The Day_, are _Il Mattino_ (_Morning_), _Il Vespre_ (_Evening_),
and _La Notte_ (_Night_). In _Il Mattino_, Parini sings:

Should dreary hypochondria’s woes oppress thee,
Should round thy charming limbs in too great measure
Thy flesh increase, then with thy lips do honor
To that clear beverage, made from the well-bronzed,
The smoking, ardent beans Aleppo sends thee,
And distant Mocha too, a thousand ship-loads;
When slowly sipped it knows no rival.

Belli’s _Il Caffè_ supplies a partial bibliography of the Italian
literature on coffee. There are many poems, some of them put to music.
As late as 1921, there were published in Bologna some advertising verses
on coffee by G.B. Zecchini with music by Cesare Cantino.

Pope Leo XIII, in his Horatian poem on _Frugality_ composed in his
eighty-eighth year, thus verses his appreciation of coffee:

Last comes the beverage of the Orient shore,
Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore.
Taste the dark fluid with a dainty lip,
Digestion waits on pleasure as you sip.

Peter Altenberg, a Vienna poet, thus celebrated the cafés of his native
city:

TO THE COFFEE HOUSE!

When you are worried, have trouble of one sort or another–to the coffee
house!
When she did not keep her appointment, for one reason or other–to the
coffee house!
When your shoes are torn and dilapidated–coffee house!
When your income is four hundred crowns and you spend five hundred–coffee
house!
You are a chair warmer in some office, while your ambition led you to seek
professional honors–coffee house!
You could not find a mate to suit you–coffee house!
You feel like committing suicide–coffee house!
You hate and despise human beings, and at the same time you can not be
happy without them–coffee house!
You compose a poem which you can not inflict upon friends you meet in the
street–coffee house!
When your coal scuttle is empty, and your gas ration exhausted–coffee
house!
When you need money for cigarettes, you touch the head waiter in
the–coffee house!
When you are locked out and haven’t the money to pay for unlocking the
house door–coffee house!
When you acquire a new flame, and intend provoking the old one, you take
the new one to the old one’s–coffee house!
When you feel like hiding you dive into a–coffee house!
When you want to be seen in a new suit–coffee house!
When you can not get anything on trust anywhere else–coffee house!

English poets from Milton to Keats celebrated coffee. Milton (1608-1674)
in his _Comus_ thus acclaimed the beverage:

One sip of this
Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight
Beyond the bliss of dreams.

Alexander Pope, poet and satirist (1688-1744), has the oft-quoted lines:

Coffee which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

In Carruthers’ _Life of Pope_, we read that this poet inhaled the steam
of coffee in order to obtain relief from the headaches to which he was
subject. We can well understand the inspiration which called forth from
him the following lines when he was not yet twenty:

As long as Mocha’s happy tree shall grow,
While berries crackle, or while mills shall go;
While smoking streams from silver spouts shall glide,
Or China’s earth receive the sable tide,
While coffee shall to British nymphs be dear,
While fragrant steams the bended head shall cheer,
Or grateful bitters shall delight the taste,
So long her honors, name and praise shall last.

Pope’s famous _Rape of the Lock_ grew out of coffee-house gossip. The
poem contains the passage on coffee already quoted:

For lo! the board with cups and spoons is crowned;
The berries crackle and the mill turns round;
On shining altars of Japan they raise
The silver lamp: the fiery spirits blaze:
From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,
While China’s earth receives the smoking tide.
At once they gratify their scent and taste.
And frequent cups prolong the rich repast
Straight hover round the fair her airy band;
Some, as she sipped, the fuming liquor fanned:
Some o’er her lap their careful plumes displayed,
Trembling, and conscious of the rich brocade.
Coffee (which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.)
Sent up in vapors to the baron’s brain
New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.

Pope often broke the slumbers of his servant at night by calling him to
prepare a cup of coffee; but for regular serving, it was his custom to
grind and to prepare it upon the table.

William Cowper’s fine tribute to “the cups that cheer but not
inebriate”, a phrase which he is said to have borrowed from Bishop
Berkeley, was addressed to tea and not to coffee, to which it has not
infrequently been wrongfully attributed. It is one of the most pleasing
pictures in _The Task_.

Cowper refers to coffee but once in his writings. In his _Pity for Poor
Africans_ he expresses himself as “shocked at the ignorance of slaves”:

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see;
What! Give up our desserts, our coffee and tea?

thus contenting himself, like many others, with words of pity where more
active protest might sacrifice his personal ease and comfort.

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), and John Keats (1795-1834), were worshippers at
the shrine of coffee; while Charles Lamb, famous poet, essayist,
humorist, and critic, has celebrated in verse the exploit of Captain de
Clieu in the following delightful verses:

THE COFFEE SLIPS

Whene’er I fragrant coffee drink,
I on the generous Frenchman think,
Whose noble perseverance bore
The tree to Martinico’s shore.
While yet her colony was new,
Her island products but a few;
Two shoots from off a coffee tree
He carried with him o’er the sea.
Each little tender coffee slip
He waters daily in the ship.
And as he tends his embryo trees.
Feels he is raising ‘midst the seas
Coffee groves, whose ample shade
Shall screen the dark Creolian maid.
But soon, alas! His darling pleasure
In watching this his precious treasure
Is like to fade–for water fails
On board the ship in which he sails.
Now all the reservoirs are shut.
The crew on short allowance put;
So small a drop is each man’s share.
Few leavings you may think there are
To water these poor coffee plants–
But he supplies their grasping wants,
Even from his own dry parched lips
He spares it for his coffee slips.
Water he gives his nurslings first,
Ere he allays his own deep thirst,
Lest, if he first the water sip,
He bear too far his eager lip.
He sees them droop for want of more;
Yet when they reach the destined shore,
With pride the heroic gardener sees
A living sap still in his trees.
The islanders his praise resound;
Coffee plantations rise around;
And Martinico loads her ships
With produce from those dear-saved slips.

In John Keats’ amusing fantasy, _Cap and Bells_, the Emperor Elfinan
greets Hum, the great soothsayer, and offers him refreshment:

“You may have sherry in silver, hock in gold, or glass’d champagne
… what cup will you drain?”

“Commander of the Faithful!” answered Hum,
“In preference to these, I’ll merely taste
A thimble-full of old Jamaica rum.”
“A simple boon,” said Elfinan; “thou mayst
Have Nantz, with which my morning coffee’s laced.”

But Hum accepts the glass of Nantz, without the coffee, “made racy with
the third part of the least drop of _crème de citron_, crystal clear.”

Numerous broadsides printed in London, 1660 to 1675, have been referred
to in chapter X. Few of them possess real literary merit.

“Coffee and Crumpets” has been much quoted. It was published in
_Fraser’s Magazine_, in 1837. Its author calls himself “Launcelot
Littledo”. The poem is quite long, and only those portions are printed
here that refer particularly to “Yemen’s fragrant berry”:

COFFEE AND CRUMPETS

_By Launcelot Littledo of Pump Court, Temple, Barrister-at-law._

There’s ten o’clock! From Hampstead to the Tower
The bells are chanting forth a lusty carol;
Wrangling, with iron tongues, about the hour,
Like fifty drunken fishwives at a quarrel;
Cautious policemen shun the coming shower;
Thompson and Fearon tap another barrel;
“_Dissolve frigus, lignum super foco.
Large reponens._” Now, come Orinoco!

To puff away an hour, and drink a cup,
A brimming _breakfast_-cup of ruddy Mocha–
Clear, luscious, dark, like eyes that lighten up
The raven hair, fair cheek, and _bella boca_
Of Florence maidens. I can never sup
Of perigourd, but (_guai a chi la tocca!_)
I’m doomed to indigestion. So to settle
This strife eternal,–Betty, bring the kettle!

Coffee! oh, Coffee! Faith, it is surprising.
‘Mid all the poets, good, and bad, and worse.
Who’ve scribbled (Hock or Chian eulogizing)
Post and papyrus with “Immortal verse”–
Melodiously similitudinising
In Sapphics languid or Alcaics terse
No one, my little brown Arabian berry,.
Hath sung thy praises–’tis surprising! very!

Were I a poet now, whose ready rhymes.
Like Tommy Moore’s, came tripping to their places–
Reeling along a merry troll of chimes,
With careless truth,–a dance of fuddled Graces;
Hear it–_Gazette_, _Post_, _Herald_, _Standard_, _Times_,
I’d write an epic! Coffee for its basis;
Sweet as e’er warbled forth from cockney throttles
Since Bob Montgomery’s or Amos Cottle’s.

Thou sleepy-eyed Chinese–enticing siren,
Pekoe! the Muse hath said in praise of thee,
“That cheers but not inebriates”; and Byron
Hath called thy sister “Queen of Tears”, Bohea!
And he, Anacreon of Rome’s age of iron,
Says, how untruly “_Quis non potius te_.”
While coffee, thou–bill-plastered gables say,
Art like old Cupid, “roasted every day.”

I love, upon a rainy night, as this is,
When rarely and more rare the coaches rattle
From street to street, to sip thy fragrant kisses;
While from the Strand remote some drunken battle
Far-faintly echoes, and the kettle hisses
Upon the glowing hob. No tittle-tattle
To make a single thought of mine an alien
From thee, my coffee-pot, my fount Castalian.

The many intervening verses cover an unhappy termination to an otherwise
delightful ball. He is sitting with his charming “Mary”, about to ask
her to be his bride, when the unfortunate overturning of a glass of red
wine into her white satin gown, at the same time overthrows all his
dreams of bliss, “for the shrew displaces the angel he adored”, and he
resigns himself to the life of “a man in chambers.”

‘Tis thus I sit and sip, and sip and think.
And think and sip again, and dip in _Fraser_,
A health, King Oliver! to thee I drink:
Long may the public have thee to amaze her.
Like _Figaro_, thou makest one’s eyelids wink,
Twirling on practised palm thy polished razor–
True Horace temper, smoothed on attic strop;
Ah! thou couldst “_faire la barbe a tout l’Europe_.”

* * * * *

Come, Oliver, and tell us what the news is;
An easy chair awaits thee–come and fill ‘t.
Come, I invoke thee, as they do the muses,
And thou shalt choose thy tipple as thou wilt.
And if thy lips my sober cup refuses,
For ruddier drops the purple grape has spilt,
We can sing, sipping in alternate verses,
Thy drink and mine, like Corydon and Thyrsis.

* * * * *

Fill the bowl, but not with wine.
Potent port, or fiery sherry;
For this milder cup of mine
Crush me Yemen’s fragrant berry.

* * * * *

Gentle is the grape’s deep cluster,
But the wine’s a wayward child;
Nectar _this_! of meeker lustre–
_This_ the cup that “draws it mild.”
Deeply drink its streams divine–
Fill the cup, but not with wine.

Prior and Montague inserted the following poetic vignette in their _City
Mouse and Country Mouse_, written in burlesque of Dryden’s _Hind and
Panther_:

Then on they jogg’d; and since an hour of talk
Might cut a banter on the tedious walk,
As I remember, said the sober mouse,
I’ve heard much talk of the Wits’ Coffee-house;
Thither, says Brindle, thou shalt go and see
Priests supping coffee, sparks and poets tea;
Here rugged frieze, there quality well drest,
These baffling the grand Senior, those the Test,
And there shrewd guesses made, and reasons given,
That human laws were never made in heaven;
But, above all, what shall oblige thy sight,
And fill thy eyeballs with a vast delight,
Is the poetic judge of sacred wit,
Who does i’ th’ darkness of his glory sit;
And as the moon who first receives the light,
With which she makes these nether regions bright,
So does he shine, reflecting from afar
The rays he borrowed from a better star;
For rules, which from Corneille and Rapin flow,
Admired by all the scribbling herd below,
From French tradition while he does dispense
Unerring truths, ‘t is schism, a damned offense,
To question his, or trust your private sense.

Geoffrey Sephton, an English poet and novelist, many years resident in
Vienna, whose fantastic stories and fairy tales are well known in
Europe, has written the following sonnets on coffee:

TO THE MIGHTY MONARCH, KING KAUHEE[350]

_By Geoffrey Sephton_

I

Away with opiates! Tantalising snares
To dull the brain with phantoms that are not.
Let no such drugs the subtle senses rot
With visions stealing softly unawares
Into the chambers of the soul. Nightmares
Ride in their wake, the spirits to besot.
Seek surer means, to banish haunting cares:
Place on the board the steaming Coffee-pot!
O’er luscious fruit, dessert and sparkling flask,
Let proudly rule as King the Great Kauhee,
For he gives joy divine to all that ask,
Together with his spouse, sweet _Eau de Vie_
Oh, let us ‘neath his sovran pleasure bask.
Come, raise the fragrant cup and bend the knee!

II

O great Kauhee, thou democratic Lord,
Born ‘neath the tropic sun and bronzed to splendour
In lands of Wealth and Wisdom, who can render
Such service to the wandering Human Horde
As thou at every proud or humble board?
Beside the honest workman’s homely fender,
‘Mid dainty dames and damsels sweetly tender,
In china, gold and silver, have we poured
Thy praise and sweetness, Oriental King.
Oh, how we love to hear the kettle sing
In joy at thy approach, embodying
The bitter, sweet and creamy sides of life;
Friend of the People, Enemy of Strife,
Sons of the Earth have born thee labouring.

In America, too, poets have sung in praise of coffee. The somewhat
doubtful “kind that mother used to make” is celebrated in James Whitcomb
Riley’s classic poem:

LIKE HIS MOTHER USED TO MAKE[351]

_”Uncle Jake’s Place,” St. Jo., Mo., 1874._

“I was born in Indiany,” says a stranger, lank and slim,
As us fellers in the restaurant was kindo’ guyin’ him,
And Uncle Jake was slidin’ him another punkin pie
And a’ extry cup o’ coffee, with a twinkle in his eye–
“I was born in Indiany–more’n forty years ago–
And I hain’t ben back in twenty–and I’m work-in’ back’ards slow;
But I’ve et in ever’ restarunt twixt here and Santy Fee,
And I want to state this coffee tastes like gittin’ home, to me!”
“Pour us out another. Daddy,” says the feller, warmin’ up,
A-speakin’ crost a saucerful, as Uncle tuk his cup–
“When I see yer sign out yander,” he went on, to Uncle Jake–
“‘Come in and git some coffee like yer mother used to make’–
I thought of _my_ old mother, and the Posey county farm,
And me a little kid again, a-hangin’ in her arm,
As she set the pot a-bilin’, broke the eggs and poured ‘em in”–
And the feller kindo’ halted, with a trimble in his chin;
And Uncle Jake he fetched the feller’s coffee back, and stood
As solemn, fer a minute, as a’ undertaker would;
Then he sorto’ turned and tiptoed to’rds the kitchen door–and next,
Here comes his old wife out with him, a-rubbin’ of her specs–
And she rushes fer the stranger, and she hollers out, “It’s him!–
Thank God we’ve met him comin’!–Don’t you know yer mother, Jim?”
And the feller, as he grabbed her, says,–”You bet I hain’t forgot–
But,” wipin’ of his eyes, says he, “yer coffee’s mighty hot!”

One of the most delightful coffee poems in English is Francis Saltus’
(d. 1889) sonnet on “the voluptuous berry”, as found in _Flasks and
Flagons_:

COFFEE

Voluptuous berry! Where may mortals find
Nectars divine that can with thee compare,
When, having dined, we sip thy essence rare,
And feel towards wit and repartee inclined?

Thou wert of sneering, cynical Voltaire,
The only friend; thy power urged Balzac’s mind
To glorious effort; surely Heaven designed
Thy devotees superior joys to share.

Whene’er I breathe thy fumes, ‘mid Summer stars,
The Orient’s splendent pomps my vision greet.
Damascus, with its myriad minarets, gleams!
I see thee, smoking, in immense bazaars,
Or yet, in dim seraglios, at the feet
Of blond Sultanas, pale with amorous dreams!

Arthur Gray, in _Over the Black Coffee_ (1902) has made the following
contribution to the poetry of coffee, with an unfortunate reflection on
tea, which might well have been omitted:

COFFEE

O, boiling, bubbling, berry, bean!
Thou consort of the kitchen queen–
Browned and ground of every feature,
The only aromatic creature,
For which we long, for which we feel,
The breath of morn, the perfumed meal.

For what is tea? It can but mean,
Merely the mildest go-between.
Insipid sobriety of thought and mind
It “cuts no figure”–we can find–
Save peaceful essays, gentle walks,
Purring cats, old ladies’ talks–

* * * * *

But coffee! can other tales unfold.
Its history’s written round and bold–
Brave buccaneers upon the “Spanish Main”,
The army’s march across the lenght’ning plain,
The lone prospector wandering o’er the hill,
The hunter’s camp, thy fragrance all distill.

So here’s a health to coffee! Coffee hot!
A morning toast! Bring on another pot.

_The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal_ published in 1909 the following
excellent stanzas by William A. Price:

AN ODE TO COFFEE

Oh, thou most fragrant, aromatic joy, impugned, abused, and often stormed
against,
And yet containing all the blissfulness that in a tiny cup could be
condensed!
Give thy contemners calm, imperial scorn–
For thou wilt reign through ages yet unborn!

Some ancient Arab, so the legend tells, first found thee–may his memory be
blest!
The world-wide sign of brotherhood today, the binding tie between the East
and West!
Good coffee pleases in a Persian dell,
And Blackfeet Indians make it more than well.

The lonely traveler in the desert range, if thou art with him, smiles at
eventide–
The sailor, as thy perfume bubbles forth, laughs at the ocean as it rages
wide–
And where the camps of fighting men are found
Thy fragrance hovers o’er each battleground.

“Use, not abuse, the good things of this life”–that is a motto from the
Prophet’s days,
And, dealing with thee thus, we ne’er shall come to troublous times or
parting of the ways.
Comfort and solace both endure with thee,
Rich, royal berry of the coffee tree!

The _New York Tribune_ published in 1915 the following lines by Louis
Untermeyer, which were subsequently included in his “—- _and Other
Poets_.”[352]

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON RISES TO THE TOAST OF COFFEE

Strong wine it is a mocker; strong wine it is a beast.
It grips you when it starts to rise; it is the Fabled Yeast.
You should not offer ale or beer from hops that are freshly picked,
Nor even Benedictine to tempt a benedict.
For wine has a spell like the lure of hell, and the devil has mixed the
brew;
And the friends of ale are a sort of pale and weary, witless crew–
And the taste of beer is a sort of a queer and undecided brown–
But, comrades, I give you coffee–drink it up, drink it down.
With a fol-de-rol-dol and a fol-de-rol-dee, etc.

Oh, cocoa’s the drink for an elderly don who lives with an elderly niece;
And tea is the drink for studios and loud and violent peace–
And brandy’s the drink that spoils the clothes when the bottle breaks in
the trunk;
But coffee’s the drink that is drunken by men who will never be drunk.
So, gentlemen, up with the festive cup, where Mocha and Java unite;
It clears the head when things are said too brilliant to be bright!
It keeps the stars from the golden bars and the lips of the tipsy town;
So, here’s to strong, black coffee–drink it up, drink it down!
With a fol-de-rol-dol and a fol-de-rol-dee, etc.

The American breakfast cup is celebrated in up-to-date American style in
the following by Helen Rowland in the _New York Evening World_:

WHAT EVERY WIFE KNOWS

Give me a man who drinks good, hot, dark, strong coffee for breakfast!
A man who smokes a good, dark, fat cigar after dinner!
You may marry your milk-faddist, or your anti-coffee crank, as you will!
But I know the magic of the coffee pot!
Let me make my Husband’s coffee–and I care not who makes eyes at him!
Give me two matches a day–
One to start the coffee with, at breakfast, and one for his cigar, after
dinner!
And I defy all the houris in Christendom to light a new flame in his heart!

Oh, sweet supernal coffee-pot!
Gentle panacea of domestic troubles,
Faithful author of that sweet nepenthe which deadens all the ills that
married folks are heir to.
Cheery, glittering, soul-soothing, warmed hearted, inanimate friend!
What wife can fail to admit the peace and serenity she owes to _you_?
To you, who stand between her and all her early morning troubles–
Between her and the before-breakfast grouch–
Between her and the morning-after headache–
Between her and the cold-gray-dawn scrutiny?
To you, who supply the golden nectar that stimulates the jaded masculine
soul,
Soothes the shaky masculine nerves, stirs the fagged masculine mind,
inspires the slow masculine sentiment,
And starts the sluggish blood a-flowing and the whole day right!

What is it, I ask you, when he comes down to breakfast dry of mouth, and
touchy of temper–
That gives him pause, and silences that scintillating barb of sarcasm on
the tip of his tongue,
With which he meant to impale you?
It is the sweet aroma of the coffee-pot–the thrilling thought of that
first delicious sip!

What is it, on the morning after the club dance,
That hides your weary, little, washed-out face and straggling, uncurled
coiffure from his critical eyes?
It is the generous coffee-pot, standing like a guardian angel between you
and him!
And in those many vital psychological moments, during the honeymoon, which
decide for or against the romance and happiness of all the rest of married
life–
Those critical before-breakfast moments when temperament meets temperament,
and will meets “won’t”–
What is it that halts you on the brink of tragedy,
And distracts you from the temptation to answer back?
It is the absorbing anxiety of watching the coffee boil!
What is it that warms his veins and soothes your nerves,
And turns all the world suddenly from a dismal gray vale of disappointment
to a bright rosy garden of hope–
And starts _another_ day gliding smoothly along like a new motor car?
What is it that will do more to transform a man from a fiend into an angel
than baptism in the River Jordan?
_It is the first cup of coffee in the morning!_

_Coffee in Dramatic Literature_

Coffee was first “dramatized”, so to speak, in England, where we read
that Charles II and the Duke of Yorke attended the first performance of
_Tarugo’s Wiles, or the Coffee House_, a comedy, in 1667, which Samuel
Pepys described as “the most ridiculous and insipid play I ever saw in
my life.” The author was Thomas St. Serf. The piece opens in a lively
manner, with a request on the part of its fashionable hero for a change
of clothes. Accordingly, Tarugo puts off his “vest, hat, perriwig, and
sword,” and serves the guests to coffee, while the apprentice acts his
part as a gentleman customer. Presently other “customers of all trades
and professions” come dropping into the coffee house. These are not
always polite to the supposed coffee-man; one complains of his coffee
being “nothing but warm water boyl’d with burnt beans,” while another
desires him to bring “chocolette that’s prepar’d with water, for I hate
that which is encouraged with eggs.” The pedantry and nonsense uttered
by a “schollar” character is, perhaps, an unfair specimen of
coffee-house talk; it is especially to be noticed that none of the
guests ventures upon the dangerous ground of politics.

In the end, the coffee-master grows tired of his clownish visitors,
saying plainly, “This rudeness becomes a suburb tavern rather than my
coffee house”; and with the assistance of his servants he “thrusts ‘em
all out of doors, after the schollars and customers pay.”

In 1694, there was published Jean Baptiste Rosseau’s comedy, _Le Caffè_,
which appears to have been acted only once in Paris, although a later
English dramatist says it met with great applause in the French capital.
_Le Caffè_ was written in Laurent’s café, which was frequented by
Fontenelle, Houdard de la Motte, Dauchet, the abbé Alary Boindin, and
others. Voltaire said that “this work of a young man without any
experience either of the world of letters or of the theater seems to
herald a new genius.”

About this time it was the fashion for the coffee-house keepers of
Paris, and the waiters, to wear Armenian costumes; for Pascal had
builded better than he knew. In _La Foire Saint-Germain_, a comedy by
Dancourt, played in 1696, one of the principal characters is old
“Lorange, a coffee merchant clothed as an Armenian”. In scene 5, he says
to Mlle. Mousset, “a seller of house dresses” that he has been “a
naturalized Armenian for three weeks.”

Mrs. Susannah Centlivre (1667?-1723), in her comedy, _A Bold Stroke for
a Wife_, produced about 1719, has a scene laid in Jonathan’s coffee
house about that period. While the stock jobbers are talking in the
first scene of act II, the coffee boys are crying, “Fresh Coffee,
gentlemen, fresh coffee?… Bohea tea, gentlemen?”

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) published “_The Coffee-House Politician, or
Justice caught in his own trap_,” a comedy, in 1730.

_The Coffee House, a dramatick Piece by James Miller_, was performed at
the Theater Royal in Drury Lane in 1737. The interior of Dick’s coffee
house figured as an engraved frontispiece to the published version of
the play.

The author states in the preface that “this piece is partly taken from a
comedy of one act written many years ago in French by the famous
Rosseau, called ‘Le Caffè’, which met with great applause in Paris.”
The coffee house in the play is conducted by the Widow Notable, who has
a pretty daughter for whom, like all good mothers, she is anxious to
arrange a suitable marriage.

In the first scene, an acrimonious conversation takes place between
Puzzle, the Politician, and Bays, the poet, in which squabble the Pert
Beau and the Solemn Beau, and other habitués of the place take part.
Puzzle discovers that a comedian and other players are in the room, and
insists that they be ejected or forbidden the house. The Widow is justly
incensed, and indignantly replies:

Forbid the Players my House, Sir! Why, Sir, I get more by them in a
Week than I do by you in seven Years. You come here and hold a
paper in your hand for an Hour, disturb the whole Company with your
Politics, call for Pen and Ink, Paper and Wax, beg a Pipe of
Tobacco, burn out half a Candle, eat half a Pound of Sugar, and
then go away, and pay Two-pence for a Dish of Coffee. I could soon
shut up my doors, if I had not some other good People to make
amends for what I lose by such as you, Sir.

All join the Widow in scoffing and jeering, and exit the highly
discomfited Puzzle. The pretty little Kitty tricks her mother with the
aid of the Player, and marries the man of her choice, but is forgiven
when he is found to be a gentleman of the Temple.

The play is in one act and has several songs. The last is one of five
stanzas, with music “set by Mr. Caret:”

SONG

What Pleasures a Coffee-House daily bestows!
To read and hear how the World merrily goes;
To laugh, sing and prattle of This, That, and T’ other;
And be flatter’d and ogl’d and kiss’d too, like Mother.

Here the Rake, after Roving and Tipling all Night,
For his Groat in the Morning may set his Head right.
And the Beau, who ne’er fouls his White fingers with Brass,
May have his Sixpen’ worth of–Stare in the Glass.

The Doctor, who’d always be ready to kill,
May ev’ry Day here take his Stand, if he will;
And the soldier, who’d bluster and challenge secure,
May draw boldly here, for–we’ll hold him he’s sure.

The Lawyer, who’s always in quest of his Prey,
May find fools here to feed upon every Day;
And the sage Politician, in Coffee-Grounds known,
May point out the Fate of each Crown but–his own.

Then, Gallants, since ev’rything here you may find
That pleasures the Fancy or profits the Mind,
Come all, and take each a full Dish of Delight,
And crowd up our Coffee-House every night.

[Illustration: SONG FROM "THE COFFEE HOUSE"]

John Timbs tells us this play “met with great opposition on its
representation, owing to its being stated that the characters were
intended for a particular family (that of Mrs. Yarrow and her daughter)
who kept Dick’s, the coffee-house which the artist had inadvertently
selected as the frontispiece. It appears,” Timbs continues, “that the
landlady and her daughter were the reigning toast of the Templars, who
then frequented Dick’s; and took the matter up so strongly that they
united to condemn the farce on the night of its production; they
succeeded, and even extended their resentment to everything suspected to
be this author’s (the Rev. James Miller) for a considerable time after.”

Carlo Goldoni, who has been called the Molière of Italy, wrote _La
Bottega di Caffè_, (The Coffee House), a naturalistic comedy of
bourgeois Venice, satirizing scandal and gambling, in 1750. The scene is
a Venetian coffee house (probably Florian’s), where several actions take
place simultaneously. Among several remarkable studies is one of a
prattling slanderer, Don Marzio, which ranks as one of the finest bits
of original character drawing the stage has ever seen. The play was
produced in English by the Chicago Theatre Society in 1912.
Chatfield-Taylor[353] thinks Voltaire probably imitated _La Bottega di
Caffè_ in his _Le Café, ou l’Ecossaise_. Goldoni was a lover of coffee,
a regular frequenter of the coffee houses of his time, from which he
drew much in the way of inspiration. Pietro Longhi, called the Venetian
Hogarth, in one of his pictures presenting life and manners in Venice
during the years of her decadence, shows Goldoni as a visitor in a café
of the period, with a female mendicant soliciting alms. It is in the
collection of Professor Italico Brass.

Goldoni, in the comedy _The Persian Wife_, gives us a glimpse of coffee
making in the middle of the eighteenth century. He puts these words into
the mouth of Curcuma, the slave:

Here is the coffee, ladies, coffee native of Arabia,
And carried by the caravans into Ispahan.
The coffee of Arabia is certainly always the best.
While putting forth its leaves on one side, upon the other the flowers
appear;
Born of a rich soil, it wishes shade, or but little sun.
Planted every three years is this little tree in the surface of the soil.
The fruit, though truly very small,
Should yet grow large enough to become somewhat green.
Later, when used, it should be freshly ground.
Kept in a warm and dry place and jealously guarded.

* * * * *

But a small quantity is needed to prepare it.
Put in the desired quantity and do not spill it over the fire;
Heat it till the foam rises, then let it subside again away from the fire;
Do this seven times at least, and coffee is made in a moment.

In 1760 there appeared in France _Le Café, ou l’Ecossaise, comédie_,
which purported to have been written by a Mr. Hume, an Englishman, and
to have been translated into French. It was in reality the work of
Voltaire, who had brought out another play, _Socrates_, in the same
manner a short time before. _Le Café_, was translated into English the
same year under the title _The Coffee House, or Fair Fugitive_. The
title page says the play is written by “Mr. Voltaire” and translated
from the French. It is a comedy in five acts. The principal characters
are: Fabrice, a good-natured man and the keeper of the coffee house;
Constantia, the fair fugitive; Sir William Woodville, a gentleman of
distinction under misfortune; Belmont, in love with Constantia, a man of
fortune and interest; Freeport, a merchant and an epitome of English
manners; Scandal, a sharper; and Lady Alton, in love with Belmont.

_Il Caffè di Campagna_, a play with music by Galuppi, appeared in Italy
in 1762.

Another Italian play, a comedy called _La Caffettiéra da Spirito_ was
produced in 1807.

_Hamilton_, a play by Mary P. Hamlin and George Arliss, the latter also
playing the title rôle, was produced in America by George C. Tyler in
1918. The first-act scene is laid in the Exchange coffee house of
Philadelphia, during the period of Washington’s first administration.
Among the characters introduced in this scene are James Monroe, Count
Tallyrand, General Philip Schuyler, and Thomas Jefferson.

The authors very faithfully reproduce the atmosphere of the coffee house
of Washington’s time. As Tallyrand remarks, “Everybody comes to see
everybody at the Exchange Coffee House…. It is club, restaurant,
merchants’ exchange, everything.”

_The Autocrat of the Coffee Stall_, a play in one act, by Harold Chapin,
was published in New York in 1921.

_Coffee and Literature in General_

An interesting book might be written on the transformation that tea and
coffee have wrought in the tastes of famous literary men. And of the two
stimulants, coffee seems to have furnished greater refreshment and
inspiration to most. However, both beverages have made civilization
their debtor in that they weaned so many fine minds from the heavy wines
and spirits in which they once indulged.

Voltaire and Balzac were the most ardent devotees of coffee among the
French _literati_. Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), the Scottish
philosopher and statesman, was so fond of coffee that he used to assert
that the powers of a man’s mind would generally be found to be
proportional to the quantity of that stimulant which he drank. His
brilliant schoolmate and friend, Robert Hall (1764-1831), the Baptist
minister and pulpit orator, preferred tea, of which he sometimes drank a
dozen cups. Cowper; Parson and Parr, the famous Greek scholars; Dr.
Samuel Johnson; and William Hazlitt, the writer and critic, were great
tea drinkers; but Burton, Dean Swift, Addison, Steele, Leigh Hunt, and
many others, celebrated coffee.

Dr. Charles B. Reed, professor in the medical school of Northwestern
University, says that coffee may be considered as a type of substance
that fosters genius. History seems to bear him out. Coffee’s essential
qualities are so well defined, says Dr. Reed, that one critic has
claimed the ability to trace throughout the works of Voltaire those
portions that came from coffee’s inspiration. Tea and coffee promote a
harmony of the creative faculties that permits the mental concentration
necessary to produce the masterpieces of art and literature.

Voltaire (1694-1778) the king of wits, was also king of coffee drinkers.
Even in his old age he was said to have consumed fifty cups daily. To
the abstemious Balzac (1799-1850) coffee was both food and drink.

In Frederick Lawton’s _Balzac_ we read: “Balzac worked hard. His habit
was to go to bed at six in the evening, sleep till twelve, and, after,
to rise and write for nearly twelve hours at a stretch, imbibing coffee
as a stimulant through these spells of composition.”

In his _Treatise on Modern Stimulants_, Balzac thus describes his
reaction to his most beloved stimulant:

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a
general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the
Grand Army on the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things
remembered arrive at full gallop, ensign to the wind. The light
cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the
artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the
shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper
is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded
with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.

When Balzac tells how Doctor Minoret, Ursule Minoret’s guardian, used to
regale his friends with a cup of “Moka,” mixed with Bourbon and
Martinique, which the Doctor insisted on personally preparing in a
silver coffee pot, it is his own custom that he is detailing. His
Bourbon he bought only in the rue Mont Blanc (now the chaussé d’Antin);
the Martinique, in the rue des Vielles Audriettes; the Mocha, at a
grocer’s in the rue de l’Université. It was half a day’s journey to
fetch them.

There have been notable contributions to the general literature of
coffee by French, Italian, English, and American writers. Space does not
permit of more than passing mention of some of them.

The reactions of the early French and English writers have been touched
upon in the chapters on the coffee houses of old London and the early
Parisian coffee houses, and in the history chapters dealing with the
evolution of coffee drinking and coffee manners and customs.

After Dufour, Galland, and La Roque in France, there were Count Rumford,
John Timbs, Douglas Ellis, and Robinson in England; Jardin and Franklin
in France; Belli in Italy; Hewitt, Thurber, and Walsh in America.

Mention has been made of coffee references in the works of Aubrey,
Burton, Addison, Steele, Bacon, and D’Israeli.

Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) the great French epicure, knew coffee as few
men before him or since. In his historical elegy, contained in
_Gastronomy as a Fine Art, or the Science of Good Living_, he exclaims:

You crossed and mitred abbots and bishops who dispensed the favors
of Heaven, and you the dreaded templars who armed yourselves for
the extermination of the Saracens, you knew nothing of the sweet
restoring influence of our modern chocolate, nor of the
thought-inspiring bean of Arabia–how I pity you!

O. de Gourcuff’s _De la Café, épître attribué à Senecé_, is deserving of
honorable mention.

An early French writer pays this tribute to the inspirational effects of
coffee:

It is 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
labor; it invokes the imagination, without which there can be no
happy inspiration. 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
compare with 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.

In Bologna, 1691, Angelo Rambaldi published _Ambrosia arabica, caffè
discorso_. This work is divided into eighteen sections, and describes
the origin, cultivation, and roasting of the bean, as well as telling
how to prepare the beverage.

During the time that Milan was under Spanish rule, Cesare Beccaria
directed and edited a publication entitled _Il Caffè_, which was
published from June 4, 1764, to May, 1766, “edited in Brescia by
Giammaria Rizzardi and undertaken by a little society of friends,”
according to the salutatory. Besides the Marchese Beccaria, other
editors and contributors were Pietro and Alexander Verri, Baillon,
Visconti, Colpani, Longhi, Albertenghi, Frisi, and Secchi. The same
periodical, with the same editorial staff, was published also in Venice
in the Typografia Pizzolato.

Another publication called _Il Caffè_, devoted to arts, letters, and
science, was published in Venice in 1850-52. Still another, having the
same name, a national weekly journal, was published in Milan, 1884-89.

An almanac, having the title _Il Caffè_, was published in Milan in 1829.

A weekly paper, called _Il Caffè Pedrocchi_, was published in Padua in
1846-48. It was devoted to art, literature and politics.

A publication called _Coffee and Surrogates_ (tea, chocolate, saffron,
pepper, and other stimulants) was founded by Professor Pietro Polli, in
Milan, in 1885; but was short-lived.

An early English magazine (1731) contains an account of divination by
coffee-grounds. The writer pays an unexpected visit, and “surprised the
lady and her company in close cabal over their coffee, the interest very
intent upon one whom, by her address and intelligence, he guessed was a
tire woman, to which she added the secret of divining by coffee grounds.
She was then in full inspiration, and with much solemnity observing the
atoms around the cup; on the one hand sat a widow, on the other a maiden
lady. They assured me that every cast of the cup is a picture of all
one’s life to come, and every transaction and circumstance is delineated
with the exactest certainty.”

The advertisement used by this seer is quite interesting:

An advise is hereby given that there has lately arrived in this
city (Dublin) the famous Mrs. Cherry, the only gentlewoman truly
learned in the occult science of _tossing of coffee grounds_; who
has with uninterrupted success for some time past practiced to the
general satisfaction of her female visitants. Her hours are after
prayers are done at St. Peter’s Church, until dinner.

(N.B. She never requires more than 1 oz. of coffee from a single
gentlewoman, and so proportioned for a second or third person, but
not to exceed that number at any one time.)

If the one ounce of coffee represented her payment for reading the
future, the charge could not be considered exorbitant!

English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
noticeably affected by coffee, and the coffee-houses of the times have
been immortalized by them; and in many instances they themselves were
immortalized by the coffee houses and their frequenters. In the chapters
already referred to and at the close of this chapter, will be found
stories, quips, and anecdotes, in which occur many names that are now
famous in art and literature.

Modern journalism dates from the publication, April 12, 1709, of the
_Tatler_, whose editor was Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) the Irish
dramatist and essayist. He received his inspiration from the coffee
houses; and his readers were the men that knew them best. In the first
issue he announced:

All accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment shall be
under the article of White’s Coffee House; poetry under that of
Will’s Coffee House; learning under the title of Grecian; foreign
and domestic news you will have from St. James’s Coffee House, and
what else I shall on any other subject offer shall be dated from my
own apartment.

Steele’s _Tatler_ was issued three times weekly until 1711, when it
suspended to be succeeded by the _Spectator_, whose principal
contributor was Joseph Addison (1672-1719), the essayist and poet, and
Steele’s school-fellow.

Sir Richard Steele immortalized the Don and Don Saltero’s coffee house
in old Chelsea in No. 34 of the _Tatler_, wherein he tells us of the
necessity of traveling to know the world, by his journey for fresh air,
no farther than the village of Chelsea, of which he fancied that he
could give an immediate description–from the five fields, where the
the robbers lie in wait, to the coffee house, where the literati sit in
council. But he found, even in a place so near town as this, that there
were enormities and persons of eminence, whom he before knew nothing of.

The coffee house was almost absorbed by the museum, Steele says:

When I came into the coffee-house, I had not time to salute the
company, before my eyes were diverted by ten thousand gimcracks
round the room, and on the ceiling. When my first astonishment was
over, comes to me a sage of thin and meagre countenance, which
aspect made me doubt whether reading or fretting had made it so
philosophic; but I very soon perceived him to be that sort which
the ancients call “gingivistee”, in our language “tooth-drawers”. I
immediately had a respect for the man; for these practical
philosophers go upon a very practical hypothesis, not to cure, but
to take away the part affected. My love of mankind made me very
benevolent to Mr. Salter, for such is the name of this eminent
barber and antiquary.

The Don was famous for his punch, and for his skill on the fiddle. He
drew teeth also, and wrote verses; he described his museum in several
stanzas, one of which is:

Monsters of all sorts are seen:
Strange things in nature as they grew so;
Some relicks of the Sheba Queen,
And fragments of the fam’d Bob Crusoe.

Steele then plunges into a deep thought why barbers should go farther in
hitting the ridiculous than any other set of men; and maintains that Don
Saltero is descended in a right line, not from John Tradescant, as he
himself asserts, but from the memorable companion of the Knight of
Mancha. Steele certifies to all the worthy citizens who travel to see
the Don’s rarities, that his double-barreled pistols, targets, coats of
mail, his sclopeta (hand-culverin) and sword of Toledo, were left to his
ancestor by the said Don Quixote; and by his ancestor to all his progeny
down to Saltero. Though Steele thus goes far in favor of Don Saltero’s
great merit, he objects to his imposing several names (without his
license) on the collection he has made, to the abuse of the good people
of England; one of which is particularly calculated to deceive religious
persons, to the great scandal of the well-disposed and may introduce
heterodox opinions. (Among the curiosities presented by Admiral Munden
was a coffin, containing the body or relics of a Spanish saint, who had
wrought miracles.) Says Steele:

He shows you a straw hat, which I know to be made by Madge Peskad,
within three miles of Bedford; and tells you “It is Pontius
Pilate’s wife’s chambermaid’s sister’s hat.” To my knowledge of
this very hat, it may be added that the covering of straw was never
used among the Jews, since it was demanded of them to make bricks
without it. Therefore, this is nothing but, under the specious
pretense of learning and antiquities, to impose upon the world.
There are other things which I can not tolerate among his rarities,
as, the china figure of the lady in the glass-case; the Italian
engine, for the imprisonment of those who go abroad with it; both
of which I hereby order to be taken down, or else he may expect to
have his letters patent for making punch superseded, be debarred
wearing his muff next winter, or ever coming to London without his
wife.

Babillard says that Salter had an old grey muff, and that, by wearing it
up to his nose, he was distinguishable at the distance of a quarter of a
mile. His wife was none of the best, being much addicted to scolding;
and Salter, who liked his glass, if he could make a trip to London by
himself, was in no haste to return.

Don Saltero’s proved very attractive as an exhibition, and drew crowds
to the coffee house. A catalog was published of which were printed more
than forty editions. Smollett, the novelist, was among the donors. The
catalog, in 1760, comprehended the following rarities:

Tigers’ tusks; the Pope’s candle; the skeleton of a Guinea-pig; a
fly-cap monkey, a piece of the true Cross; the Four Evangelists’
heads cut out on a cherry stone; the King of Morocco’s
tobacco-pipe; Mary Queen of Scots’ pincushion; Queen Elizabeth’s
prayer-book; a pair of Nun’s stockings; Job’s ears, which grew on a
tree; a frog in a tobacco stopper; and five hundred more odd
relics!

The Don had a rival, as appears by _A Catalogue of the Rarities to be
seen at Adam’s, at the Royal Swan, in Kingsland-road, leading from
Shoreditch Church, 1756_. Mr. Adams exhibited, for the entertainment of
the curious:

Miss Jenny Cameron’s shoes; Adam’s eldest daughter’s hat; the heart
of the famous Bess Adams, that was hanged at Tyburn with Lawyer
Carr, January 18, 1736-37; Sir Walter Raleigh’s tobacco pipe; Vicar
of Bray’s clogs; engine to shell green peas with; teeth that grew
in a fish’s belly; Black Jack’s ribs; the very comb that Abraham
combed his son Isaac and Jacob’s head with; Wat Tyler’s spurs;
rope that cured Captain Lowry of the head-ach, ear-ach, tooth-ach,
and belly-ach; Adam’s key of the fore and back door of the Garden
of Eden, etc., etc.

These are only a few out of five hundred other equally marvellous
exhibits.

The success of Don Saltero in attracting visitors to his coffee house,
induced the proprietor of the Chelsea bunhouse to make a similar
collection of rarities, to attract customers for his buns; and to some
extent it was successful.

In the first number of the _Spectator_, Addison says:

There is no place of general resort wherein I do not often make my
appearance. Sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of
politicians at Will’s, and listening with great attention to the
narratives that are made in those little circular audiences.
Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child’s, and while I seem attentive to
nothing but the _Postman_, overhear the conversation of every table
in the room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James’ coffee house,
and _sometimes_ join the little committee of politics in the inner
room as one who comes there to hear and improve. My face is
likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, and in the
theatres both of Drury Lane and the Hay Market. I have been taken
for a merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years, and
sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock jobbers at
Jonathan’s; in short, wherever I see a cluster of people, I always
mix with them, though I never open my lips, but in my own club.

In the second number he tells that:

I am now settled with a widow woman, who has a great many children
and complies with my humor in everything. I do not remember that we
have exchanged a word together for these five years; my coffee
comes into my chamber every morning without asking for it, if I
want fire I point to the chimney, if water, to my basin; upon which
my landlady nods as much as to say she takes my meaning, and
immediately obeys my signals.

Three of Addison’s papers in the _Spectator_ (Nos. 402, 481, and 568)
are humorously descriptive of the coffee houses of the period. No. 403
opens with the remark that:

The courts of two countries do not so much differ from one another,
as the Court and the City, in their peculiar ways of life and
conversation. In short, the inhabitants of St. James,
notwithstanding they live under the same laws, and speak the same
language, are a distinct people from those of Cheapside, who are
likewise removed from those of the Temple on the one side, and
those of Smithfleld on the other, by several climates and degrees
in their way of thinking and conversing together.

For this reason, the author takes a ramble through London and
Westminster, to gather the opinions of his ingenious countrymen upon a
current report of the king of France’s death.

I know the faces of all the principal politicians within the bills
of mortality; and as every coffee-house has some particular
statesman belonging to it, who is the mouth of the street where he
lives, I always take care to place myself near him, in order to
know his judgment on the present posture of affairs. And, as I
foresaw the above report would produce a new face of things in
Europe, and many curious speculations in our British coffee-houses,
I was very desirous to learn the thoughts of our most eminent
politicians on that occasion.

That I might begin as near the fountain-head as possible, I first
of all called in at St. James’s, where I found the whole outward
room in a buzz of politics; the speculations were but very
indifferent towards the door, but grew finer as you advanced to the
upper end of the room, and were so much improved by a knot of
theorists, who sat in the inner room, within the steams of the
coffee-pot, that I there heard the whole Spanish monarchy disposed
of, and all the line of Bourbons provided for in less than a
quarter of an hour.

I afterwards called in at Giles’s, where I saw a board of French
gentlemen sitting upon the life and death of their grand monarque.
Those among them who had espoused the Whig interest very positively
affirmed that he had departed this life about a week since, and
therefore, proceeded without any further delay to the release of
their friends in the galleys, and to their own re-establishment;
but, finding they could not agree among themselves, I proceeded on
my intended progress.

Upon my arrival at Jenny Man’s I saw an alert young fellow that
cocked his hat upon a friend of his, who entered just at the same
time with myself, and accosted him after the following manner:
“Well, Jack, the old prig is dead at last. Sharp’s the word. Now or
never, boy. Up to the walls of Paris, directly;” with several other
deep reflections of the same nature.

I met with very little variation in the politics between Charing
Cross and Covent Garden. And, upon my going into Will’s, I found
their discourse was gone off, from the death of the French King, to
that of Monsieur Boileau, Racine, Corneille, and several other
poets, whom they regretted on this occasion as persons who would
have obliged the world with very noble elegies on the death of so
great a prince, and so eminent a patron of learning.

At a coffee-house near the Temple, I found a couple of young
gentlemen engaged very smartly in a dispute on the succession to
the Spanish monarchy. One of them seemed to have been retained as
advocate for the Duke of Anjou, the other for his Imperial Majesty.
They were both for regarding the title to that kingdom by the
statute laws of England; but finding them going out of my depth, I
pressed forward to Paul’s Churchyard, where I listened with great
attention to a learned man, who gave the company an account of the
deplorable state of France during the minority of the deceased
king.

I then turned on my right hand into Fish-street, where the chief
politician of that quarter, upon hearing the news, (after having
taken a pipe of tobacco, and ruminated for some time) “If,” says
he, “the King of France is certainly dead, we shall have plenty of
mackerel this season: our fishery will not be disturbed by
privateers, as it has been for these ten years past.” He afterwards
considered how the death of this great man would affect our
pilchards, and by several other remarks infused a general joy into
his whole audience.

I afterwards entered a by-coffee-house that stood at the upper end
of a narrow lane, where I met with a Nonjuror engaged very warmly
with a laceman who was the great support of a neighboring
conventicle. The matter in debate was whether the late French King
was most like Augustus Caesar, or Nero. The controversy was carried
on with great heat on both sides, and as each of them looked upon
me very frequently during the course of their debate, I was under
some apprehension that they would appeal to me, and therefore laid
down my penny at the bar and made the best of my way to Cheapside.

I here gazed upon the signs for some time before I found one to my
purpose. The first object I met in the coffee-room was a person who
expressed a great grief for the death of the French King; but upon
his explaining himself, I found his sorrow did not arise from the
loss of the monarch, but for his having sold out of the Bank about
three days before he heard the news of it. Upon which a
haberdasher, who was the oracle of the coffee-house, and had his
circle of admirers about him, called several to witness that he had
declared his opinion, above a week before, that the French King was
certainly dead; to which he added, that considering the late
advices we had received from France, it was impossible that it
could be otherwise. As he was laying these together, and debating
to his hearers with great authority, there came a gentlemen from
Garraway’s, who told us that there were several letters from France
just come in, with advice that the King was in good health, and was
gone out a hunting the very morning the post came away; upon which
the haberdasher stole off his hat that hung upon a wooden peg by
him, and retired to his shop with great confusion. This
intelligence put a stop to my travels, which I had prosecuted with
so much satisfaction; not being a little pleased to hear so many
different opinions upon so great an event, and to observe how
naturally, upon such a piece of news, every one is apt to consider
it to his particular interest and advantage.

Johnson wrote in his _Life of Addison_ concerning the _Tatler_ and the
_Spectator_ that they were:

Published at a time when two parties, loud, restless and violent,
each with plausible declarations, and both perhaps without any
distinct determination of its views, were agitating the nation; to
minds heated with political contest they supplied cooler and more
inoffensive reflections…. They had a perceptible influence on the
conversation of the time, and taught the frolic and the gay to
unite merriment with decency, effects which they can never wholly
lose.

Harold Routh in the Cambridge _History of Literature_, speaking of the
_Spectator_, says:

It surpassed the _Tatler_ in style and in thought. It gave
expression to the _power_ of commerce. For more than a century
traders had been characterized as dishonest and avaricious, because
playwrights and pamphleteers generally wrote for the leisure
classes, and were themselves too poor to have any but unpleasant
relations with men of business. Now merchants were becoming
ambassadors of civilization, and had developed intellect so as to
control distant and, as it seemed, mysterious sources of wealth; by
a stroke of the pen and largely through the coffee houses they had
come to know their own importance and power.

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was very fond of good eating, and almost daily
entries were made in his _Diary_ of dinner delicacies that he had
enjoyed. One dinner, that he considered a great success, was served to
eight persons, and consisted of oysters, a hash of rabbits, a lamb, a
rare chine of beef; next a great dish of roasting fowl (“cost me about
30 s.”) a tart, then fruit and cheese. “My dinner was noble enough … I
believe this day’s feast will cost me near 5 pounds.” But it will be
noted that coffee was not mentioned as a part of the menu.

He makes countless references to visits paid to this and that coffee
house, but records only one instance of actually drinking coffee:

Up betimes to my office, and thence at seven o’clock to Sir G.
Carteret, and there with Sir J. Minnes made an end of his accounts,
but staid not to dinner my Lady having made us drink our morning
draft there of several wines, but I drank nothing but some of her
coffee, which was poorly made, with a little sugar in it.

This note which he considered worthy of record was certainly not
inspired by the excellence of the good lady’s matutinal coffee.

William Cobbett (1762-1835) the English-American politician, reformer,
and writer on economics, denounced coffee as “slops”; but he was one of
a remarkably small minority. Before his day, one of England’s greatest
satirists, Dean Swift, (1667-1745) led a long roll of literary men who
were devotees of coffee.

Swift’s writings are full of references to coffee; and his letters from
Stella came to him under cover, at the St. James coffee house. There is
scarcely a letter to Esther (Vanessa) Vanhomrigh which does not contain
a significant reference to coffee, by which the course of their
friendship and clandestine meetings may be traced. In one dated August
13, 1720, written while traveling from place to place in Ireland, he
says:

We live here in a very dull town, every valuable creature absent,
and Cad says he is weary of it, and would rather prefer his coffee
on the barrenest mountain in Wales than be king here.

A fig for partridges and quails,
Ye dainties I know nothing of ye;
But on the highest mount in Wales,
Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.

In another letter, about two years later, replying to one in which
Vanessa has reproached him and begged him to write her soon, he advises:

The best maxim I know in life, is to drink your coffee when you
can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it; while you continue
to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I
sympathize with you, that I am not cheerful enough to write, for, I
believe, coffee once a week is necessary, and you know very well
that coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.

These various references to coffee are thought to have been based upon
an incident in the early days of their friendship, when on the occasion
of the Vanhomrigh family journeying from Dublin to London, Vanessa
accidentally spilt her coffee in the chimney-place at a certain inn,
which Swift considered a premonition of their growing friendship.
Writing from Clogher, Swift reminds Vanessa:

Remember that riches are nine parts in ten of all that is good in
life, and health is the tenth–drinking coffee comes long after,
and yet it is the eleventh, but without the two former you cannot
drink it right.

In another letter he writes facetiously, in memory of her playful
badinage:

I long to drink a dish of coffee in the sluttery and hear you dun
me for a secret, and “Drink your coffee; why don’t you drink your
coffee?”

Leigh Hunt had very pleasant things to say about coffee, giving to it
the charm of appeal to the imagination, which he said one never finds in
tea. For example:

Coffee, like tea, used to form a refreshment by itself, some hours
after dinner; it is now taken as a digester, right upon that meal
or the wine, and sometimes does not even close it; or the digester
itself is digested by a liquor of some sort called a _Chasse-Café_
[coffee-chaser]. We like coffee better than tea for taste, but tea
“for a constancy.” To be perfect in point of relish (we do not say
of wholesomeness) coffee should be strong and hot, with little milk
and sugar. It has been drunk after this mode in some parts of
Europe, but the public have nowhere, we believe, adopted it. The
favorite way of taking it at a meal, abroad, is with a great
superfluity of milk–very properly called, in France _café au lait_
(coffee _to the_ milk). One of the pleasures we receive in drinking
coffee is that, being the universal drink in the East, it reminds
of that region of the “Arabian Nights” as smoking does for the same
reason; though neither of these refreshments, which are identified
with Oriental manners, is to be found in that enchanting work. They
had not been discovered when it was written; the drink then was
sherbet. One can hardly fancy what a Turk or a Persian could have
done without coffee and a pipe, any more than the English ladies
and gentlemen, before the civil wars, without tea for breakfast.

In his old age, Immanuel Kant, the great metaphysician, became extremely
fond of coffee; and Thomas de Quincey relates a little incident showing
Kant’s great eagerness for the after-dinner cup.

At the beginning of the last year of his life, he fell into a
custom of taking, immediately after dinner, a cup of coffee,
especially on those days when it happened that I was of his party.
And such was the importance that he attached to his little pleasure
that he would even make a memorandum beforehand, in the blank paper
book that I had given him, that on the next day I was to dine with
him, and consequently “_that there was to be coffee_.” Sometimes in
the interest of conversation, the coffee was forgotten, but not for
long. He would remember and with the querulousness of old age and
infirm health would demand that coffee be brought “upon the spot.”
Arrangements had always been made in advance, however; the coffee
was ground, and the water was boiling: and in the very moment the
word was given, the servant shot in like an arrow and plunged the
coffee into the water. All that remained, therefore, was to give it
time to boil up. But this trifling delay seemed unendurable to
Kant. If it were said, “Dear Professor, the coffee will be brought
up in a moment,” he would say, _”Will be!_ There’s the rub, that it
only _will_ be.” Then he would quiet himself with a stoical air,
and say, “Well, one can die after all; it is but dying; and in the
next world, thank God, there is no drinking of coffee and
consequently no waiting for it.”

When at length the servant’s steps were heard upon the stairs, he
would turn round to us, and joyfully call out: “Land, land! my dear
friends, I see land.”

Thackeray (1811-1863) must have suffered many tea and coffee
disappointments. In the _Kickleburys on the Rhine_ he asks: “Why do they
always put mud into coffee aboard steamers? Why does the tea generally
taste of boiled boots?”

In _Arthur’s_, A. Neil Lyons has preserved for all time the atmosphere
of the London coffee stall. “I would not,” he says, “exchange a night at
Arthur’s for a week with the brainiest circle in London.” The book is a
collection of short stories. As already recorded, Harold Chapin
dramatized this picturesque London institution in _The Autocrat of the
Coffee Stall_.

In General Horace Porter’s _Campaigning with Grant_, we have three
distinct coffee incidents within fifty-odd pages; or explicitly, see
pages 47, 56, 101; where, deep in the fiercest snarls of The Wilderness
campaign we are treated to:

General Grant, slowly sipping his coffee … a full ration of that
soothing army beverage…. The general made rather a singular meal
preparatory to so exhausting a day as that which was to follow. He
took a cucumber, sliced it, poured some vinegar over it, and
partook of nothing else except a cup of strong coffee…. The
general seemed in excellent spirits, and was even inclined to be
jocose. He said to me, “We have just had our coffee, and you will
find some left for you.” … I drank it with the relish of a
shipwrecked mariner.

One of the first immediate supplies General Sherman desired from
Wilmington, on reaching Fayetteville and lines of communication in
March, 1865, was, expressly, coffee; does he not say so himself, on page
297 of the second volume of his _Memoirs_?

Still more expressly, towards the close of his _Memoirs_, and among
final recommendations, the fruit of his experiences in that whole vast
war, General Sherman says this for coffee:

Coffee has become almost indispensable, though many substitutes
were found for it, such as Indian corn, roasted, ground and boiled
as coffee, the sweet potato, and the seed of the okra plant
prepared in the same way. All these were used by the people of the
South, who for years could procure no coffee, but I noticed that
the women always begged of us real coffee, which seemed to satisfy
a natural yearning or craving more powerful than can be accounted
for on the theory of habit. Therefore I would always advise that
the coffee and sugar ration be carried along, even at the expense
of bread, for which there are many substitutes.

George Agnew Chamberlain’s novel _Home_ contains a vivid description of
coffee-making on an old plantation, and could only have been written by
a devoted lover of this drink. Gerry Lansing, the American, has escaped
drowning in the river, and is now lost in the Brazilian forest. He finds
his way at last to an old plantation house:

A stove was built into the masonry, and a cavernous oven gaped from
the massive wall. At the stove was an old negress, making coffee
with shaky deliberation…. The girl and the wrinkled old woman
made him sit down at the table, and then placed before him crisp
rusks of mandioc flour and steaming coffee whose splendid aroma
triumphed over the sordidness of the scene and through the nostrils
reached the palate with anticipatory touch. It was sweetened with
dark, pungent syrup and was served black in a capacious bowl, as
though one could not drink too deeply of the elixir of life. Gerry
ate ravenously and sipped the coffee, at first sparingly, then
greedily…. Gerry set down the empty bowl with a sigh. The rusks
had been delicious. Before the coffee the name of nectar dwindled
to impotency. Its elixir rioted in his veins.

In the _Rosary_, Florence L. Barclay has a Scotch woman tell how she
makes coffee. She says:

Use a jug–it is not what you make it in; it is how ye make it. It
all hangs upon the word fresh–freshly roasted–freshly
ground–water freshly boiled. And never touch it with metal. Pop it
into an earthenware jug, pour in your boiling water straight upon
it, stir it with a wooden spoon, set it on the hob ten minutes to
settle; the grounds will all go to the bottom, though you might not
think it, and you pour it out, fragrant, strong and clear. But the
secret is, _fresh, fresh, fresh_, and don’t stint your coffee.

Cyrus Townsend Brady’s _The Corner in Coffee_ is “a thrilling romance of
the New York coffee market.”

Coffee, Du Barry, and Louis XV figure in one scene of the story of _The
Moat with the Crimson Stains_, as told by Elizabeth W. Champney in her
_Romance of the Bourbon Chateaux_.[354] It tells of the German
apprentice Riesener, who assisted his master Oeben in designing for
Louis XV a beautiful desk with a secret drawer, which it took ten years
of unremitting industry to execute. At the end, Riesener was to be
accepted by his master as a partner and a son-in-law. Little Victoire,
who loved to sit in a punt and trail her doll in the waters of the
Bievre to see to what color its frock would be changed by the dyes of
the Gobelin factory, was then only five, and Madam Oeben twenty-three.
As the years rolled by, Riesener grew to love the mother and not the
daughter, who, meanwhile, shot up into a slim girl, not of her mother’s
beauty, but of a loveliness all her own. Then there was a quarrel
because the young apprentice thought the master should have resented the
suggestion of M. Duplessis that his wife pose in the nude for the
statuettes which were to hold the sconces on the king’s desk; and
Riesener left in a fine youthful frenzy, vowing he would never return
while the _maître_ lived. The latter, unable to complete the masterpiece
which he loved more than anything else on earth, sought death, and
perished in the crimson waters of the Bievre.

The _maître_ had no enemies, but his quarrel with Riesener caused a fear
to spring up in the widow’s heart that the apprentice might have been
guilty of his murder, so she refused to see him when, hearing of his
master’s death, he returned, stricken with remorse, to finish the desk.
On it were the statuettes modeled in perfect likeness of Mlle. de
Vaubernier, a wily little milliner of Riesener’s bohemian set who had
taken this way to bring herself to the attention of Louis XV. The ruse
was successful; and after the acceptance of the desk, there was
installed a new _maîtresse en titre_, the notorious Madame Du Barry,
erstwhile the pretty milliner, Mlle. de Vaubernier.

Later, Madame Du Barry sent for the now famous _ebeniste_ (cabinet
maker); and, when her negro page Zamore admitted him, he found His
Majesty Louis XV kneeling in front of the fireplace, making coffee for
her while she laughed at him for scalding his fingers. He had been
summoned to show the king the mechanism of the secret drawer, so
cunningly concealed in the king’s desk that no one could find it. But
Riesener knew not the secret of his master, who had died without
revealing it. Then the red revolution came; and when the pretty pavilion
at Louveciennes was sacked, and its costly furniture hurled down the
cliff to the Seine, the king’s desk, shattered almost beyond repair, was
carried to the Gobelins’ factory and presented to Mme. Oeben in
recognition of her husband’s workmanship. Then the secret compartment
was found to have been disclosed, and Riesener was absolved by a letter
therein, from the _maître_, who intimated he was about to end it all
because of paralysis. Riesener marries the widow and all ends happily.

James Lane Allen, in _The Kentucky Warbler_, tells a tale of the Blue
Grass country and of a young hero who wanders after a bird’s note to
find romance and the key to his own locked nature. Here is an incident
from his first forest adventure:

There was one tree he curiously looked around for, positive that he
should not be blind to it if fortunate enough to set his eyes on
one–the coffee tree. That is, he felt sure he’d recognize it if it
yielded coffee ready to drink, of which never in his life had they
given him enough. Not once throughout his long troubled experience
as to being fed had he been allowed as much coffee as he craved.
Once, when younger, he had heard some one say that the only tree in
all the American forests that bore the name of Kentucky was the
Kentucky coffee tree, and he had instantly conceived a desire to
pay a visit in secret to that corner of the woods. To take his cup
and a few lumps of sugar and sit under the boughs and catch the
coffee as it dripped down…. No one to hold him back … as much
as he wanted at last…. The Kentucky coffee tree–his favorite in
Nature!

John Kendrick Bangs relates, in _Coffee and Repartee_[355], some amusing
skirmishes indulged in at the boarding-house table, between the Idiot
and the guests, where coffee served the purpose of enlivening the tilt:

“Can’t I give you another cup of coffee?” asked the landlady of the
School Master.

“You may,” returned the School Master, pained at the lady’s
grammar, but too courteous to call attention to it save by the
emphasis with which he spoke the word “may”.

Said the Idiot: “You may fill my cup too, Mrs. Smithers.”

“The coffee is all gone,” returned the landlady, with a snap.

“Then, Mary,” said the Idiot, gracefully turning to the maid, “you
may give me a glass of ice water. It is quite as warm, after all,
as the coffee and not quite so weak.”

One other little skit remains at the expense of Mrs. Smithers’ coffee.
At the breakfast table, where the air, as usual, is charged with
repartee, Mr. Whitechoker, the minister, says to his landlady:

“Mrs. Smithers, I’ll have a dash of hot water in my coffee, this
morning.” Then with a glance toward the Idiot, he added, “I think it
looks like rain.”

“Referring to the coffee, Mr. Whitechoker?” queried the Idiot….

“Ah,–I don’t quite follow you,” replied the Minister with some
annoyance.

“You said something looked like rain, and I asked you if the thing
referred to was the coffee, for I was disposed to agree with you,”
said the Idiot.

“I am sure,” put in Mrs. Smithers, “that a gentleman of Mr.
Whitechoker’s refinement would not make any such insinuation, sir.
He is not the man to quarrel with what is set before him.”

“I must ask your pardon, Madam,” returned the Idiot politely. “I
hope I am not the man to quarrel with my food, either. Indeed, I
make it a rule to avoid unpleasantness of all sorts, particularly
with the weak, under which category I find your coffee.”

_Coffee Quips and Anecdotes_

Coffee literature is full of quips and anecdotes. Probably the most
famous coffee quip is that of Mme. de Sévigné, who, as already told in
chapter XI, was wrongfully credited with saying, “Racine and coffee will
pass.” It was Voltaire in his preface to _Irene_ who thus accused the
amiable letter-writer; and she, being dead, could not deny it.

That Mme. de Sévigné was at one time a coffee drinker is apparent from
this quotation from one of her letters: “The cavalier believes that
coffee gives him warmth, and I at the same time, foolish as you know me,
do not take it any longer.”

La Roque called the beverage “the King of Perfumes”, whose charm was
enriched when vanilla was added.

Emile Souvestre (1806-1854) said: “Coffee keeps, so to say, the balance
between bodily and spiritual nourishment.”

Isid Bourdon said: “The discovery of coffee has enlarged the realm of
illusion and given more promise to hope.”

An old Bourbon proverb says: “To an old man a cup of coffee is like the
door post of an old house–it sustains and strengthens him.”

Jardin says that in the Antilles, instead of orange blossoms, the brides
carry a spray of coffee blossoms; and when a woman remains unmarried,
they say she has lost her coffee branch. “We say in France, that she has
_coiffé_ Sainte-Catherine.”

Fontenelle and Voltaire have both been quoted as authors of the famous
reply to the remark that coffee was a slow poison: “I think it must be,
for I’ve been drinking it for eighty-five years and am not dead yet.”

In Meidinger’s _German Grammar_ the “slow-poison” _bon mot_ is
attributed to Fontenelle.

It seems reasonable to give Fontenelle credit for this _bon mot_.
Voltaire died at eighty-four. Fontenelle lived to be nearly a hundred
years. Of his cheerfulness at an advanced age an anecdote is related. In
conversation, one day, a lady a few years younger than Fontenelle
playfully remarked, “Monsieur, you and I stay here so long, methinks
Death has forgotten us.” “Hush! Speak in a whisper, madame,” replied
Fontenelle, “_tant mieux!_ (so much the better!) don’t remind him of
us.”

Flaubert, Hugo, Baudelaire, Paul de Kock, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de
Musset, Zola, Coppée, George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, and Sarah
Bernhardt, all have been credited with many clever or witty sallies
about coffee.

Prince Talleyrand (1754-1839), the French diplomat and wit, has given us
the cleverest summing up of the ideal cup of coffee. He said it should
be “_Noir comme le diable, chaud comme l’enfer, pur comme un ange, doux
comme l’amour._” Or in English, “black as the devil, hot as hell, pure
as an angel, sweet as love.”

This quip has been wrongfully attributed to Brillat-Savarin. Talleyrand
said also:

A cup of coffee lightly tempered with good milk detracts nothing
from your intellect; on the contrary, your stomach is freed by it,
and no longer distresses your brain; it will not hamper your mind
with troubles, but give freedom to its working. Suave molecules of
Mocha stir up your blood, without causing excessive heat; the organ
of thought receives from it a feeling of sympathy; work becomes
easier, and you will sit down without distress to your principal
repast, which will restore your body, and afford you a calm
delicious night.

Among coffee drinkers a high place must be given to Prince Bismarck
(1815-1898). He liked coffee unadulterated. While with the Prussian army
in France, he one day entered a country inn and asked the host if he had
any chicory in the house. He had. Bismarck said: “Well, bring it to me;
all you have.” The man obeyed, and handed Bismarck a canister full of
chicory.

“Are you sure this is all you have?” demanded the chancellor.

“Yes, my lord, every grain.”

“Then,” said Bismarck, keeping the canister by him, “go now and make me
a pot of coffee.”

This same story has been related of François Paul Jules Grévy
(1807-1891), president of France, 1879-1887. According to the French
story, Grévy never took wine, even at dinner. He was, however,
passionately fond of coffee. To be certain of having his favorite
beverage of the best quality, he always, when he could, prepared it
himself. Once he was invited, with a friend, M. Bethmont, to a hunting
party by M. Menier, the celebrated manufacturer of chocolate, at
Noisiel. It happened that M. Grévy and M. Bethmont lost themselves in
the forest. Trying to find their way out, they stumbled upon a little
wine house, and stopped for a rest. They asked for something to drink.
M. Bethmont found his wine excellent; but, as usual, Grévy would not
drink. He wanted coffee, but he was afraid of the decoction which would
be brought him. He got a good cup, however, and this is how he managed
it:

“Have you any chicory?” he said to the man.

“Yes, sir.”

“Bring me some.”

Soon the proprietor returned with a small can of chicory.

“Is that all you have?” asked Grévy.

“We have a little more.”

“Bring me the rest.”

When he came again, with another can of chicory, Grévy said:

“You have no more?”

“No, sir.”

“Very well. Now go and make me a cup of coffee.”

As already told, Louis XV had a great passion for coffee, which he made
himself. Lenormand, the head gardener at Versailles, raised six pounds
of coffee a year which was for the exclusive use of the king. The king’s
fondness for coffee and for Mme. Du Barry gave rise to a celebrated
anecdote of Louveciennes which was accepted as true by many serious
writers. It is told in this fashion by Mairobert in a pamphlet
scandalizing Du Barry in 1776:

His Majesty loves to make his own coffee and to forsake the cares
of the government. One day the coffee pot was on the fire and, his
Majesty being occupied with something else, the coffee boiled over.
“Oh France, take care! Your coffee _f—- le camp_!” cried the
beautiful favorite.

Charles Vatel has denied this story.

It is related of Jean Jacques Rousseau that once when he was walking in
the Tuileries he caught the aroma of roasting coffee. Turning to his
companion, Bernardino de Saint-Pierre, he said, “Ah, that is a perfume
in which I delight; when they roast coffee near my house, I hasten to
open the door to take in all the aroma.” And such was the passion for
coffee of this philosopher of Geneva that when he died, “he just missed
doing it with a cup of coffee in his hand”.

Barthez, confidential physician of Napoleon the first, drank a great
deal of it, freely, calling it “the intellectual drink.”

Bonaparte, himself, said: “Strong coffee, and plenty, awakens me. It
gives me a warmth, an unusual force, a pain that is not without
pleasure. I would rather suffer than be senseless.”

Edward R. Emerson[356] tells the following story of the Café Procope.
One day while M. Saint-Foix was seated at his usual table in this café
an officer of the king’s body-guard entered, sat down, and ordered a cup
of coffee, with milk and a roll, adding, “It will serve me for a
dinner.” At this, Saint-Foix remarked aloud that a cup of coffee, with
milk and a roll, was a confoundedly poor dinner. The officer
remonstrated. Saint-Foix reiterated his remark, adding that nothing he
could say to the contrary would convince him that it was _not_ a
confoundedly poor dinner. Thereupon a challenge was given and accepted,
and the whole company present adjourned as spectators to a duel which
ended by Saint-Foix receiving a wound in the arm.

“That is all very well,” said the wounded combatant; “but I call you to
witness, gentlemen, that I am still profoundly convinced that a cup of
coffee, with milk and a roll, is a confoundedly poor dinner.”

At this moment the principals were arrested and carried before the Duke
de Noailles, in whose presence Saint-Foix, without waiting to be
questioned, said:

“Monseigneur, I had not the slightest intention of offending this
gallant officer who, I doubt not, is an honorable man; but your
excellency can never prevent my asserting that a cup of coffee, with
milk and a roll, is a confoundedly poor dinner.”

“Why, so it is,” said the Duke.

“Then I am not in the wrong,” persisted Saint-Foix; “and a cup of
coffee”–at these words magistrates, delinquents, and auditory burst
into a roar of laughter, and the antagonists forthwith became warm
friends.

“Boswell in his _Life of Johnson_ tells a story of an old chevalier de
Malte, of _ancienne noblesse_, but in low circumstances, who was in a
coffee house in Paris, where was also Julien, the great manufacturer at
Gobelins, of fine tapestry, so much distinguished for the figures and
the colours. The chevalier’s carriage was very old. Says Julien with a
plebeian insolence, ‘I think, sir, you had better have your carriage new
painted.’

“The chevalier looked at him with indignant contempt, and answered:

“‘Well, sir, you may take it home and dye it.’

“All the coffee house rejoiced at Julien’s confusion.”

Sydney Smith (1771-1845) the English clergyman and humorist, once said:
“If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee; it is the
intellectual beverage.”

Our own William Dean Howells pays the beverage this tribute: “This
coffee intoxicates without exciting, soothes you softly out of dull
sobriety, making you think and talk of all the pleasant things that ever
happened to you.”

The wife of the president of the United States prefers coffee to tea.
Afternoon guests at the White House may be refreshed, if they choose, by
a sip of tea. But while tea is on tap for callers, Mrs. Harding always
has coffee for those who, like herself, prefer it.

_Old London Coffee-House Anecdotes_

A good-sized volume might be compiled of the many anecdotes that have
been written about habitués of the London coffee houses of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

[Illustration: DR. JOHNSON'S SEAT AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE]

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the lexicographer, was one of the most
constant frequenters of the coffee houses of his day. His big, awkward
figure was a familiar sight as he went about attended by his satellite,
young James Boswell, who was to write about him for the delight of
future generations in his marvelous _Life of Johnson_. The intellectual
and moral peculiarities of the man found a natural expression in the
coffee house. Johnson was fifty-four and Boswell only twenty-three when
the two first met in Tom Davies’ book-shop in Covent Garden. The story
is told by Boswell with great particularity and characteristic naiveté:

Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to
him. I was much agitated, and recollecting his prejudice against
the Scotch, of which I had heard so much, I said to Davies, “Don’t
tell him where I come from.” “From Scotland,” cried Davies
roguishly. “Mr. Johnson,” said I, “I do indeed come from Scotland,
but I cannot help it.” I am willing to flatter myself that I meant
this as a light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as
a humiliating abasement at the expense of my country. But however
that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky, for with that
quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the
expression, “come from Scotland!” which I used In the sense of
being of that country; and, as if I had come away from it, or left
it, he retorted, “That, sir, I find is what a great many of your
countrymen cannot help.”

Nothing daunted, however, Boswell within a week called upon Johnson in
his chambers. This time the doctor urged him to tarry. Three weeks later
he said to him, “Come to me as often as you can.” Within a fortnight
thereafter Boswell was giving the great man a sketch of his own life and
Johnson was exclaiming, “Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to
you.”

[Illustration: ORIGINAL COFFEE ROOM, OLD COCK TAVERN]

When people began to ask, “Who is this Scotch cur at Johnson’s heels?”
Goldsmith replied: “He is not a cur; he is only a bur. Tom Davies flung
him at Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking.”

Thus began one of the strangest friendships, out of which developed the
most delightful biography in all literature. Boswell’s taste for
literary adventures, and Johnson’s literary vagrancy met in a
companionship that found much satisfaction in the bohemianism of the
inns and coffee houses of old London. Boswell thus describes the
eccentric doctor’s outlook on this mode of living:

We dined today at an excellent inn at Chapel-House, where Mr.
Johnson commented on English coffee houses and inns remarking that
the English triumphed over the French in one respect, in that the
French had no perfection of tavern life. There is no private house,
(said he) in which people can enjoy themselves so well, as at a
capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things,
ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire
that everybody should be easy; in the nature of things it cannot
be: there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The
master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests; the guests
are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man, but a very impudent
dog indeed, can as freely command what is in another man’s house,
as if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general
freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more
noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you
call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with
the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of
an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir, there is
nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much
happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. He then repeated,
with great emotion, Shenstone’s lines:

“Whoe’er has travell’d life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome at an inn.”

Patient delving into Johnsoniana is rewarded with many anecdotes about
the mad doctor philosopher and his faithful reporter who delighted in
translating his genius to the world.

Boswell was a wine-bibber, but Johnson confessed to being “a hardened
and shameless tea drinker.” When Boswell twigged him for abstaining from
the stronger drink, the doctor replied: “Sir, I have no objection to a
man’s drinking wine if he can do it in moderation. I find myself apt to
go to excess in it and therefore, after having been for some time
without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to
it.”

Another time he said of tea: “What a delightful beverage must that be
that pleases all palates at a time when they can take nothing else at
breakfast.”

[Illustration: FIREPLACE IN THE COFFEE ROOM OF THE OLD COCK TAVERN]

[Illustration: MORNING GOSSIP IN THE COFFEE ROOM OF THE OLD COCK
TAVERN]

In his early days Johnson had David Garrick as an unwilling pupil. After
the actor had become famous and his prosperity had turned his head, he
was wont to “put the table in a roar” by mimicking the doctor’s
grimaces. There is a story that on the occasion of a certain dinner
party where both were guests, Garrick indulged in a coarse jest on the
great man’s table manners. After the merriment had subsided, Doctor
Johnson arose solemnly and said:

“Gentlemen, you must doubtless suppose from the extreme familiarity with
which Mr. Garrick has thought fit to treat me that I am an acquaintance
of his; but I can assure you that until I met him here, I never saw him
but once before–and then I paid five shillings for the sight.”

A certain sycophant, thinking to curry favor with Johnson, took to
laughing loud and long at everything he said. Johnson’s patience at last
became exhausted, and after a particularly objectionable outburst, he
turned upon the boor with:

“Pray sir, what is the matter? I hope I have not said anything which you
can comprehend!”

Because of his physical and mental disabilities Dr. Johnson was not a
good social animal. Nevertheless, when it pleased his humor, he could be
the cavalier, for his mind overcame every impediment.

It is related of him that once when a lady who was showing him around
her garden expressed her regret at being unable to bring a particular
flower to perfection, he arose gallantly to the occasion by taking her
hand and remarking:

“Then, madam, permit me to bring perfection to the flower!”

Again, when Mrs. Siddons, the great English tragedienne, called upon him
in his chambers and the servant did not promptly bring her a chair, his
quick wit made capital of the incident by the remark:

“You see, madam, wherever you go there are no seats to be had!”

John Thomas Smith in his _Antiquarian Rambles in the Streets of London_
(1846), tells an amusing incident in the life of Sir George Etherege,
the playright, who having run up a bill at Locket’s ordinary, a coffee
house much frequented by dramatists of the period, and finding himself
unable to pay, began to absent himself from the place. Mrs. Locket
thereupon sent a man to dun and to threaten him with prosecution if he
did not pay. Sir George sent back word that if she stirred a step in the
matter he would kiss her. On receiving this answer, the good lady, much
exasperated, called for her hood and scarf, and told her husband, who
interposed, that “she would see if there was any fellow alive who would
have the impudence–” “Prithee! my dear, don’t be so rash,” said her
husband; “there is no telling what a man may do in his passion.”

Richard Savage, the English poet and friend of Johnson, who included him
in his famous _Lives of the Poets_, was arrested for the murder of James
Sinclair after a drunken brawl in Robinson’s coffee house in 1727. He
was found guilty, but narrowly escaped the death penalty by the
intercession of the countess of Hertford. A feature of his trial was the
extraordinary charge to the jury of Judge Page, who for his hard words
and his love of hanging, is damned to everlasting fame in the verse of
Pope. The charge was:

Gentlemen of the jury! You are to consider that Mr. Savage is a
very great man, a much greater man than you or I, gentlemen of the
jury; that he wears very fine clothes, much finer than you or I,
gentlemen of the jury; that he has an abundance of money in his
pocket, much more money than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but,
gentlemen of the jury, is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the
jury, that Mr. Savage should therefore kill you or me, gentlemen of
the jury?

Albert V. Lally[357] has made a collection of old coffee-house
anecdotes. Among them are the following:

The story is told of how Sir Richard Steele in Button’s Coffee
House was once made the umpire in an amusing difference between two
unnamed disputants. These two were arguing about religion, when one
of them said: “I wonder, sir, you should talk of religion, when
I’ll hold you five guineas you can’t say the Lord’s prayer.”
“Done,” said the other, “and Sir Richard Steele shall hold the
stakes.” The money being deposited the gentleman began with, “I
believe in God”, and so went right through the creed. “Well,” said
the other when he had finished, “I didn’t think he could have done
it.”

* * * * *

There is another story of a famous judge, Sir Nicholas Bacon, who
was importuned by a criminal to spare his life on account of
kinship. “How so,” demanded the judge. “Because my name is Hog and
yours is Bacon; and hog and bacon are so near akin that they cannot
be separated.”

“Ay,” responded the judge dryly, “but you and I cannot yet be
kindred, for hog is not bacon until it is well hanged.”

* * * * *

On another occasion a nervous barrister, pleading before this same
judge, began with repeated references to his “unfortunate client.”
“Go on, sir,” said the judge, “so far the Court is with you.”

* * * * *

Of Jonathan Swift it is related that a gentleman who had sought to
persuade him to accept an invitation to dinner said, in way of
special inducement, “I’ll send you my bill of fare.” “Send me
rather your bill of company,” retorted Swift, showing his
appreciation of the truth that not that which is eaten, but those
who eat, form the more important part of a good dinner.

On the occasion when the “dreadful Judge Jeffreys” was trying Compton,
bishop of London, before the Court of High Commission, that prelate, as
Campbell relates in his _Lives of the Lord Chancellors_, complained of
having no copy of the indictment. Jeffreys replied to this excuse that
“all the coffee houses had it for a penny.” The case being resumed after
the lapse of a week, the bishop again protested that he was unprepared,
owing to his continued difficulty in obtaining a copy of the necessary
document. Jeffreys was obliged once more to adjourn the case, and in so
doing offered this bantering apology:

“My lord,” said he, “in telling you our commission was to be seen in
every coffee house, I did not speak with any design to reflect on your
lordship, as if you were a haunter of coffee houses. I abhor the
thoughts of it!”

As the Judge had once been distinctly opposed to the party and
principles which he went to such a length in supporting, so had he
formerly owed something to the very institution against which his last
blow was directed. Roger North relates (and Campbell repeats the story)
that, “after he was called to the bar, he used to sit in coffee houses
and order his man to come and tell him that company attended him at his
chamber; at which he would huff and say, ‘let them stay a little, I will
come presently,’ and thus made a show of business.”

John Timbs, in his _Clubs and Club Life in London_, has a host of
anecdotes and stories of the old London coffee houses, among them the
following:

Garraway’s noted coffee-house, situated in Change-alley, Cornhill,
had a threefold celebrity; tea was first sold in England here; it
was a place of great resort in the time of the South Sea Bubble;
and was later a place of great mercantile transactions. The
original proprietor was Thomas Garway, tobacconist and coffee-man,
the first who retailed tea, recommending it as a cure of all
disorders.

[Illustration: "HIS WARMEST WELCOME AT AN INN"

The George Inn of today has retained a portion of its old
galleries, the original of which completely surrounded the
courtyard in typical "Dickens Inn" style. The visitor can imagine
Mr. Pickwick emerging from the door of one of the bedrooms and
calling into the yard to Sam Weller. In the old-fashioned coffee
room on the ground floor one may still lunch and dine enclosed in
high bench seats]

Ogilby, the compiler of the _Britannia_, had his standing lottery
of books at Mr. Garway’s Coffee-house from April 7, 1673, till
wholly drawn off. And, in the “Journey through England,” 1722,
Garraway’s, Robins’s, and Joe’s are described as the three
celebrated coffee-houses: “In the first, the People of Quality, who
have business in the City, and the most considerable and wealthy
citizens frequent. In the second the Foreign Banquiers, and often
even Foreign Ministers. And in the third, the buyers and sellers of
stock.”

Wines were sold at Garraway’s in 1673, “by the candle”, that is, by
auction, while an inch of candle burns. In the _Tatler_, No. 147,
we read: “Upon my coming home last night, I found a very handsome
present of French wine, left for me, as a taste of 216 hogshead,
which are to be put on sale at 20£ a hogshead, at Garraway’s
Coffee-house, in Exchange alley” etc. The sale by candle is not,
however, by candlelight, but during the day. At the commencement of
the sale, when the auctioneer has read a description of the
property, and the conditions on which it is to be disposed of, a
piece of candle, usually an inch long, is lighted, and he who is
the last bidder at the time the light goes out is declared the
purchaser.

Swift, in his _Ballad on the South Sea Scheme_, 1721, did not
forget Garraway’s:

There is a gulf, where thousands fell,
Here all the bold adventurers came,
A narrow sound, though deep as hell,
‘Change alley is the dreadful name.

Subscribers here by thousands float,
And jostle one another down,
Each paddling in his leaky boat,
And here they fish for gold and drown.

Now buried in the depths below,
Now mounted up to heaven again,
They reel and stagger to and fro,
At their wits’ end, like drunken men.

Meantime secure on Garway cliffs,
A savage race, by shipwrecks fed,
Lie waiting for the founder’d skiffs,
And strip the bodies of the dead.

Dr. Jno. Radcliff, who was a rash speculator in the South Sea
Scheme, was usually planted at a table at Garraway’s about Exchange
time, to watch the turn of the market; and here he was seated when
the footman of his powerful rival, Dr. Edward Hannes, came into
Garraway’s and inquired by way of a puff, if Dr. H. was there. Dr.
Radcliff, who was surrounded with several apothecaries and
chirurgeons that flocked about him, cried out, “Dr. Hannes is not
here,” and desired to know “who wants him?” The fellow’s reply was,
“such a lord and such a lord;” but he was taken up with the dry
rebuke, “No, no, friend, you are mistaken; the Doctor wants those
lords.” One of Radcliff’s ventures was five thousand guineas upon
one South Sea project. When he was told at Garraway’s that ’twas
all lost, “Why,” said he, “’tis but going up five thousand pair of
stairs more.” “This answer,” says Tom Brown, “deserved a statue.”

* * * * *

Jonathan’s Coffee-house was another Change-alley coffee-house,
which is described in the _Tatler_, No. 38, as “the general mart of
stock-jobbers,” and the _Spectator_, No. 1, tells us that he
“sometimes passes for a Jew in the assembly of stock-jobbers at
Jonathan’s.” This was their rendezvous, where gambling of all sorts
was carried on, notwithstanding a former prohibition against the
assemblage of the jobbers, issued by the City of London, which
prohibition continued unrepealed until 1825.

* * * * *

The _Spectator_, No. 16, notices some gay frequenters of the
Rainbow Coffee-house in Fleet Street: “I have received a letter
desiring me to be very satirical upon the little muff that is now
in fashion; another informs me of a pair of silver garters buckled
below the knee, that have been lately seen at the Rainbow
Coffee-house in Fleet Street.”

Mr. Moncrieff, the dramatist, used to tell that about 1780, this
house was kept by his grandfather, Alexander Moncrieff, when it
retained its original title of “The Rainbow Coffee-house.”

* * * * *

Nando’s Coffee-house at the east corner of Inner Temple-lane, No.
17, Fleet-Street, by some confused with Groom’s house, No. 16, was
the favourite haunt of Lord Thurlow before he dashed into law
practice. At this coffee-house a large attendance of professional
loungers was attracted by the fame of the punch and the charms of
the landlady, which, with the small wits, were duly admired by and
at the bar. One evening, the famous cause of Douglas _v._ the Duke
of Hamilton was the topic of discussion, when Thurlow being
present, it was suggested, half in earnest, to appoint him junior
counsel, which was done. This employment brought him acquaintance
with the Duchess of Queensberry, who saw at once the value of a man
like Thurlow, and recommended Lord Bute to secure him by a silk
gown.

* * * * *

Dick’s Coffee-house, at No. 8, Fleet-street, (south side, near
Temple Bar) was originally “Richard’s”, named from Richard Torner,
or Turner, to whom the house was let in 1680. Richard’s was
frequented by Cowper, when he lived in the Temple. In his own
account of his insanity, Cowper tells us:

“At breakfast I read the newspaper, and in it a letter, which, the
further I perused it, the more closely engaged my attention. I
cannot now recollect the purport of it; but before I had finished
it, it appeared demonstratively true to me that it was a libel or
satire upon me. The author appeared to be acquainted with my
purpose of self-destruction, and to have written that letter on
purpose to secure and hasten the execution of it. My mind,
probably, at this time began to be disordered; however it was, I
was certainly given to a strong delusion. I said within myself,
‘Your cruelty shall be gratified; you shall have your revenge,’ and
flinging down the paper in a fit of strong passion, I rushed
hastily out of the room; directing my way towards the fields, where
I intended to find some house to die in; or, if not, determined to
poison myself in a ditch, where I could meet with one sufficiently
retired.”

* * * * *

Lloyd’s Coffee-house was one of the earliest establishments of its
kind; it is referred to in a poem printed in the year 1700, called
the _Wealthy Shopkeeper, or Charitable Christian_:

Now to Lloyd’s Coffee-house he never fails,
To read the letters, and attend the sales.

In 1710, Steele (_Tatler_, No. 246) dates from Lloyd’s his Petition
on Coffee-house Orators and Newsvendors. And Addison, in
_Spectator_, April 23, 1711, relates this droll incident: “About a
week since there happened to me a very odd accident, by reason of
one of these my papers of minutes which I had accidentally dropped
at Lloyd’s Coffee-house, where the auctions are usually kept.
Before I missed it, there were a cluster of people who had found
it, and were diverting themselves with it at one end of the
coffee-house. It had raised so much laughter among them before I
observed what they were about, that I had not the courage to own
it. The boy of the coffee-house, when they had done with it,
carried it about in his hand, asking everybody if they had dropped
a written paper; but nobody challenging it, he was ordered by those
merry gentlemen who had before perused it, to get up into the
auction pulpit, and read it to the whole room, that if anybody
would own it they might. The boy accordingly mounted the pulpit,
and with a very audible voice read what proved to be minutes, which
made the whole coffee-house very merry; some of them concluded it
was written by a madman, and others by somebody that had been
taking notes out of the _Spectator_. After it was read, and the boy
was coming put of the pulpit, the _Spectator_ reached his arm out,
and desired the boy to given it him; which was done according. This
drew the whole eyes of the company upon the _Spectator_; but after
casting a cursory glance over it, he shook his head twice or thrice
at the reading of it, twisted it into a kind of match, and lighted
his pipe with it. ‘My profound silence,’ says the _Spectator_,
‘together with the steadiness of my countenance, and the gravity of
my behaviour during the whole transaction, raised a very loud
laugh on all sides of me; but as I had escaped all suspicion of
being the author, I was very well satisfied, and applying myself to
my pipe and the _Postman_, took no further notice of anything that
passed about me.’”

* * * * *

The Smyrna Coffee-house in Pall Mall, was, in the reign of Queen
Anne, famous for “that cluster of wise-heads” found sitting every
evening from the left side of the fire to the door. The following
announcement in the _Tatler_, No. 78, is amusing: “This is to give
notice to all ingenious gentlemen in and about the cities of London
and Westminster, who have a mind to be instructed in the noble
sciences of music, poetry and politics, that they repair to the
Smyrna Coffee-house, in Pall Mall, betwixt the hours of eight and
ten at night, where they may be instructed gratis, with elaborate
essays ‘by word of mouth’, on all or any of the above-mentioned
arts.”

* * * * *

St. James’s Coffee-house was the famous Whig coffee-house from the
time of Queen Anne till late in the reign of George III. It was the
last house but one on the southwest corner of St. James’s street,
and is thus mentioned in No. 1 of the _Tatler_: “Foreign and
Domestic News you will have from St. James’s Coffee-house.” It
occurs also in the passage quoted previously from the _Spectator_.
The St. James’s was much frequented by Swift; letters for him were
left here. In his Journal to Stella he says: “I met Mr. Harley, and
he asked me how long I had learnt the trick of writing to myself?
He had seen your letter through the glass case at the Coffee-house,
and would swear it was my hand.”

Elliott, who kept the coffee-house, was, on occasions, placed on a
friendly footing with his guests. Swift, in his Journal to Stella,
November 19, 1710, records an odd instance of this familiarity:
“This evening I christened our coffee-man Elliott’s child; when the
rogue had a most noble supper, and Steele and I sat amongst some
scurvy company over a bowl of punch.”

In the first advertisement of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Town
Eclogues,” they are stated to have been read over at the St.
James’s Coffee-house, when they were considered by the general
voice to be productions of a Lady of Quality. From the proximity of
the house to St. James’s Palace, it was much frequented by the
Guards; and we read of its being no uncommon circumstance to see
Dr. Joseph Warton at breakfast in the St. James’s Coffee-house,
surrounded by officers of the Guards, who listened with the utmost
attention and pleasure to his remarks.

To show the order and regularity observed at the St. James’s, we
may quote the following advertisement, appended to the _Tatler_.
No. 25; “To prevent all mistakes that may happen among gentlemen of
the other end of the town, who come but once a week to St. James’s
Coffee-house, either by miscalling the servants, or requiring such
things from them as are not properly within their respective
provinces, this is to give notice that Kidney, keeper of the
book-debts of the outlying customers, and observer of those who go
off without paying, having resigned that employment, is succeeded
by John Sowton; to whose place of enterer of messages and first
coffee-grinder, William Bird is promoted; and Samuel Burdock comes
as shoe-cleaner in the room of the said Bird.”

But the St. James’s is more memorable as the house where originated
Goldsmith’s celebrated poem, “Retaliation.” The poet belonged to a
temporary association of men of talent, some of them members of the
Club, who dined together occasionally here. At these dinners he was
generally the last to arrive. On one occasion, when he was later
than usual, a whim seized the company to write epitaphs on him as
“the late Dr. Goldsmith”, and several were thrown off in a playful
vein. The only one extant was written by Garrick, and has been
preserved, very probably, by its pungency:

Here lies poet Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll;
He wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll.

Goldsmith did not relish the sarcasm, especially coming from such a
quarter; and, by way of _retaliation_, he produced the famous poem,
of which Cumberland has left a very interesting account, but which
Mr. Forster, in his “Life of Goldsmith”, states to be “pure
romance”. The poem itself, however, with what was prefixed to it
when published, sufficiently explains its own origin. What had
formerly been abrupt and strange in Goldsmith’s manners, had now so
visibly increased, as to become matter of increased sport to such
as were ignorant of its cause; and a proposition made at one of the
dinners, when he was absent, to write a series of epitaphs upon him
(his “country dialect” and his awkward person) was agreed to, and
put in practice by several of the guests. The active aggressors
appear to have been Garrick, Doctor Bernard, Richard Burke, and
Caleb Whitefoord. Cumberland says he, too, wrote an epitaph; but it
was complimentary and grave, and hence the grateful return he
received. Mr. Forster considers Garrick’s epitaph to indicate the
tone of all. This, with the rest, was read to Goldsmith when he
next appeared at the St. James’s Coffee-house, where Cumberland,
however, says he never again met his friends. But “the Doctor was
called on for Retaliation,” says the friend who published the poem
with that name, “and at their next meeting produced the following,
which I think adds one leaf to his immortal wreath.”
“‘Retaliation’”, says Sir Walter Scott, “had the effect of placing
the author on a more equal footing with his Society than he had
ever before assumed.”

Cumberland’s account differs from the version formerly received,
which intimates that the epitaphs were written before Goldsmith
arrived: whereas the pun, “the late Dr. Goldsmith” appears to have
suggested the writing of the epitaphs. In the “Retaliation”,
Goldsmith has not spared the characters and failings of his
associates, but has drawn them with satire, at once pungent and
good-humoured. Garrick is smartly chastised; Burke, the Dinner-bell
of the House of Commons, is not let off; and of all the more
distinguished names of the Club, Thomson, Cumberland, and Reynolds
alone escape the lash of the satirist. The former is not mentioned,
and the two latter are even dismissed with unqualified and
affectionate applause.

Still we quote Cumberland’s account of the “Retaliation” which is
very amusing from the closely circumstantial manner in which the
incidents are narrated, although they have so little relationship
to truth: “It was upon a proposal started by Edmund Burke, that a
party of friends who had dined together at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s
and my house, should meet at the St. James’s Coffee-house, which
accordingly took place, and was repeated occasionally with much
festivity and good fellowship. Dr. Bernard, Dean of Derry; a very
amiable and old friend of mine, Dr. Douglas, since Bishop of
Salisbury; Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver
Goldsmith, Edmund and Richard Burke, Hickey, with two or three
others, constituted our party. At one of these meetings, an idea
was suggested of extemporary epitaphs upon the parties present; pen
and ink were called for, and Garrick, offhand, wrote an epitaph
with a good deal of humour, upon poor Goldsmith, who was the first
in jest, as he proved to be in reality, that we committed to the
grave. The Dean also gave him an epitaph, and Sir Joshua
illuminated the Dean’s verses with a sketch of his bust in pen and
ink, inimitably caricatured. Neither Johnson nor Burke wrote
anything, and when I perceived that Oliver was rather sore, and
seemed to watch me with that kind of attention which indicated his
expectation of something in the same kind of burlesque with theirs;
I thought it time to press the joke no further, and wrote a few
couplets at a side-table, which, when I had finished, and was
called upon by the company to exhibit, Goldsmith, with much
agitation, besought me to spare him; and I was about to tear them,
when Johnson wrested them out of my hand, and in a loud voice read
them at the table. I have now lost recollection of them, and, in
fact, they were little worth remembering; but as they were serious
and complimentary, the effect upon Goldsmith was the more pleasing
for being so entirely unexpected. The concluding line, which was
the only one I can call to mind, was:

“All mourn the poet, I lament the man.

“This I recollect, because he repeated it several times, and seemed
much gratified by it. At our next meeting he produced his epitaphs
… and this was the last time he ever enjoyed the company of his
friends.”

* * * * *

Will’s Coffee-house, the predecessor of Button’s, and even more
celebrated than that coffee-house, was kept by William Urwin. It
first had the title of the Red Cow, then of the Rose, and, we
believe, is the same house alluded to in the pleasant story in the
second number of the _Tatler_. “Supper and friends expect we at the
Rose.”

Dean Lockier has left this life-like picture of his interview with
the presiding genius (Dryden) at Will’s.

“I was about seventeen when I first came up to town,” says the
Dean, “an odd-looking boy, with short rough hair, and that sort of
awkwardness which one always brings up at first out of the country
with one. However, in spite of my bashfulness and appearance, I
used, now and then, to thrust myself into Will’s to have the
pleasure of seeing the most celebrated wits of that time, who then
resorted thither. The second time that ever I was there, Mr. Dryden
was speaking of his own things, as he frequently did, especially of
such as had been lately published. ‘If anything of mine is good,’
says he, ”tis ‘Mac-Flecno’, and I value myself the more upon it,
because it is the first piece of ridicule written in heroics.’ On
hearing this I plucked up my spirit so far as to say, in a voice
but just loud enough to be heard, ‘that “Mac-Flecno” was a very
fine poem, but that I had not imagined it to be the first that was
ever writ that way.’ On this, Dryden turned short upon me, as
surprised at my interposing; asked me how long ‘I had been a dealer
in poetry’; and added, with a smile, ‘Pray, Sir, what is it that
you did imagine to have been writ so before?’–I named Boileau’s
‘Lutrin’ and Tassoni’s ‘Secchia Rapita,’ which I had read, and knew
Dryden had borrowed some strokes from each. ”Tis true,’ said
Dryden, ‘I had forgot them.’ A little after, Dryden went out, and
in going, spoke to me again, and desired me to come and see him the
next day. I was highly delighted with the invitation; went to see
him accordingly; and was well acquainted with him after, as long as
he lived.”

* * * * *

Will’s Coffee-house was the open market for libels and lampoons,
the latter named from the established burden formerly sung to them:

_Lampone, lampone, camerada lampone._

There was a drunken fellow, named Julian, who was a characterless
frequenter of Will’s, and Sir Walter Scott has given this account
of him and his vocation:

“Upon the general practice of writing lampoons, and the necessity
of finding some mode of dispersing them, which should diffuse the
scandal widely while the authors remained concealed, was founded
the self-erected office of Julian, Secretary, as he called himself,
to the Muses. This person attended Will’s, the Wits’ Coffee-house,
as it was called; and dispersed among the crowds who frequented
that place of gay resort copies of the lampoons which had been
privately communicated to him by their authors. ‘He is described,’
says Mr. Malone, ‘as a very drunken fellow, and at one time was
confined for a libel.’”

* * * * *

Tom Brown describes ‘a Wit and a Beau set up with little or no
expense. A pair of red stockings and a swordknot set up one, and
peeping once a day in at Will’s, and two or three second-hand
sayings, the other.’

* * * * *

Pepys, one night, going to fetch home his wife, stopped in Covent
Garden, at the Great Coffee-house there, as he called Will’s, where
he never was before: “Where,” he adds, “Dryden, the poet (I knew at
Cambridge), and all the Wits of the town, and Harris the player,
and Mr. Hoole of our College. And had I had time then, or could at
other times, it will be good coming thither, for there, I perceive,
is very witty and pleasant discourse. But I could not tarry, and,
as it was late, they were all ready to go away.”

Addison passed each day alike, and much in the manner that Dryden
did. Dryden employed his mornings in writing, dined _en famille_,
and then went to Will’s, “only he came home earlier o’ nights.”

Pope, when very young, was impressed with such veneration for
Dryden, that he persuaded some friends to take him to Will’s
Coffee-house, and was delighted that he could say that he had seen
Dryden. Sir Charles Wogan, too, brought up Pope from the Forest of
Windsor, to dress _a la mode_, and introduce at Will’s
Coffee-house. Pope afterwards described Dryden as “a plump man with
a down look, and not very conversible,” and Cibber could tell no
more “but that he remembered him a decent old man, arbiter of
critical disputes at Will’s.” Prior sings of–

The younger Stiles,
Whom Dryden pedagogues at Will’s!

Most of the hostile criticism on his Plays, which Dryden has
noticed in his various Prefaces, appear to have been made at his
favourite haunt, Will’s Coffee-house.

Dryden is generally said to have been returning from Will’s to his
house in Gerard Street, when he was cudgelled in Rose Street by
three persons hired for the purpose by Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
in the winter of 1679. The assault, or “the Rose-alley Ambuscade,”
certainly took place; but it is not so certain that Dryden was on
his way from Will’s, and he then lived in Long-acre, not Gerard
Street.

It is worthy of remark that Swift was accustomed to speak
disparagingly of Will’s, as in his “Rhapsody on Poetry:”

Be sure at Will’s the following day
Lie snug, and hear what critics say;
And if you find the general vogue
Pronounces you a stupid rogue,
Damns all your thoughts as low and little;
Sit still, and swallow down your spittle.

Swift thought little of the frequenters of Will’s: “he used to say,
the worst conversation he ever heard in his life was at Will’s
Coffee-house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to
assemble; that is to say, five or six men who had writ plays or at
least prologues, or had a share in a miscellany, came thither, and
entertained one another with their trifling composures, in so
important an air as if they had been the noblest efforts of human
nature, or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them.”

In the first number of the _Tatler_, poetry is promised under the
article of Will’s Coffee-house. The place, however, changed after
Dryden’s time: “you used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the
hands of every man you met, you have now only a pack of cards; and
instead of the cavils about the turn of the expression, the
elegance of the style, and the like, the learned now dispute only
about the truth of the game.” “In old times, we used to sit upon a
play here, after it was acted, but now the entertainment’s turned
another way.”

The _Spectator_ is sometimes seen “thrusting his head into a round
of politicians at Will’s, and listening with great attention to the
narratives that are made in these little circular audiences.” Then,
we have as an instance of no one member of human society but that
would have some little pretension for some degree in it, “like him
who came to Will’s Coffee-house upon the merit of having writ a
posie of a ring.” And, “Robin, the porter who waits at Will’s, is
the best man in town for carrying a billet: the fellow has a thin
body, swift step, demure looks, sufficient sense, and knows the
town.”

After Dryden’s death, in 1701, Will’s continued for about ten years
to be still the Wits’ Coffee-house, as we see by Ned Ward’s
account, and by the “Journey through England” in 1722.

Pope entered with keen relish into society, and courted the
correspondence of the town wits and coffee-house critics. Among his
early friends was Mr. Henry Cromwell, one of the _cousinry_ of the
Protector’s family: he was a bachelor, and spent most of his time
in London; he had some pretensions to scholarship and literature,
having translated several of Ovid’s Elegies, for Tonson’s
Miscellany. With Wycherly, Gay, Dennis, the popular actors and
actresses of the day, and with all the frequenters of Will’s,
Cromwell was familiar. He had done more than take a pinch out of
Dryden’s snuff-box, which was a point of high ambition and honor at
Will’s; he had quarrelled with him about a frail poetess, Mrs.
Elizabeth Thomas, whom Dryden had christened Corinna, and who was
also known as Sappho. Gay characterized this literary and eccentric
beau as

Honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches:

it being his custom to carry his hat in his hand when walking with
ladies. What with ladies and literature, rehearsals and reviews,
and critical attention to the quality of his coffee and Brazil
snuff, Henry Cromwell’s time was fully occupied in town. Cromwell
was a dangerous acquaintance for Pope at the age of sixteen or
seventeen, but he was a very agreeable one. Most of Pope’s letters
to his friends are addressed to him at the Blue Hall, in Great
Wild-street, near Drury Lane, and others to “Widow Hambledon’s
Coffee-house, at the end of Princes-street, near Drury-lane,
London.” Cromwell made one visit to Binfield; on his return to
London, Pope wrote to him, “referring to the ladies in particular,”
and to his favorite coffee.

* * * * *

Will’s was the great resort for the wits of Dryden’s time, after
whose death it was transferred to Button’s. Pope describes the
houses as “opposite each other, in Russell-street, Covent Garden,”
where Addison established Daniel Button, in a new house, about
1712; and his fame, after the production of _Cato_, drew many of
the Whigs thither. Button had been servant to the Countess of
Warwick. The house is more correctly described as “over against
Tom’s, near the middle of the south side of the street.”

Addison was the great patron of Button’s; but it is said that when
he suffered any vexation from his Countess, he withdrew from
Button’s house. His chief companions, before he married Lady
Warwick, were Steele, Budgell, Philips, Carey, Davenant, and
Colonell Brett. He used to breakfast with one or other of them in
St. James’s-place, dine at taverns with them, then to Button’s, and
then to some tavern again, for supper in the evening; and this was
the usual round of his life, as Pope tells us in Spencer’s
Anecdotes, where Pope also says: “Addison usually studied all the
morning, then met his party at Button’s, dined there, and stayed
five or six hours; and sometimes far into the night. I was of the
company for about a year, but found it too much for me; it hurt my
health, and so I quitted it.” Again: “There had been a coldness
between me and Mr. Addison for some time, and we had not been in
company together for a good while anywhere but at Button’s
Coffee-house, where I used to see him almost every day.”

Here Pope is reported to have said of Patrick, the lexicographer,
that “a dictionary-maker might know the meaning of one word, but
not of two put together.”

Button’s was the receiving house for contributions to _The
Guardian_, for which purpose was put up a lion’s head letter box,
in imitation of the celebrated lion at Venice, as humorously
announced. Thus:

“N.B.–Mr. Ironside has, within five weeks last past, muzzled three
lions, gorged five, and killed one. On Monday next the skin of the
dead one will be hung up, _in terrorem_, at Button’s Coffee-house.”

* * * * *

“I intend to publish once every week the roarings of the Lion, and
hope to make him roar so loud as to be heard over all the British
nation. I have, I know not how, been drawn into tattle of myself,
more majorum, almost the length of a whole _Guardian_. I shall
therefore fill up the remaining part of it with what still relates
to my own person, and my correspondents. Now I would have them all
know that on the 20th instant, it is my intention to erect a Lion’s
Head, in imitation of those I have described in Venice, through
which all the private commonwealth is said to pass. This head is to
open a most wide and voracious mouth, which shall take in such
letters and papers as are conveyed to me by my correspondents, it
being my resolution to have a particular regard to all such matters
as come to my hands through the mouth of the Lion. There will be
under it a box, of which the key will be in my own custody, to
receive such papers as are dropped into it. Whatever the Lion
swallows I shall digest for the use of the publick. This head
requires some time to finish, the workmen being resolved to give it
several masterly touches, and to represent it as ravenous as
possible. It will be set up in Button’s Coffee-house, in Covent
Garden, who is directed to show the way to the Lion’s Head, and to
instruct any young author how to convey his works into the mouth of
it with safety and secrecy.”

* * * * *

“I think myself obliged to acquaint the publick, that the Lion’s
Head, of which I advertised them about a fortnight ago, is now
erected at Button’s Coffee-house, in Russell-street, Covent Garden,
where it opens its mouth at all hours for the reception of such
intelligence as shall be thrown into it. It is reckoned an
excellent piece of workmanship, and was designed by a great hand in
imitation of the antique Egyptian lion, the face of it being
compounded out of that of a lion and a wizard. The features are
strong and well furrowed. The whiskers are admired by all that have
seen them. It is planted on the western side of the Coffee-house,
holding its paws under the chin, upon a box, which contains
everything that he swallows. He is, indeed, a proper emblem of
knowledge and action, being all head and paws.”

* * * * *

“Being obliged, at present, to attend a particular affair of my
own, I do empower my printer to look into the arcana of the Lion,
and select out of them such as may be of publick utility; and Mr.
Button is hereby authorized and commanded to give my said printer
free ingress and egress to the lion, without any hindrance, let, or
molestation whatsoever, until such time as he shall receive orders
to the contrary. And, for so doing, this shall be his warrant.”

* * * * *

“My Lion, whose jaws are at all times open to intelligence, informs
me that there are a few enormous weapons still in being; but that
they are to be met with only in gaming houses and some of the
obscure retreats of lovers, in and about Drury-lane and Covent
Garden.”

* * * * *

This memorable Lion’s Head was tolerably well carved: through the
mouth the letters were dropped into a till at Button’s; and beneath
were inscribed these two lines from Martial:

_Cervantur magnis isti Cervicibus ungues;
Non nisi delicta pascitur ille fera._

The head was designed by Hogarth, and is etched in Ireland’s
“Illustrations.” Lord Chesterfield is said to have once offered for
the Head fifty guineas. From Button’s it was removed to the
Shakspeare’s Head Tavern, under the Piazza, kept by a person named
Tomkyns; and in 1751, was, for a short time, placed in the Bedford
Coffee-house immediately adjoining the Shakspeare, and there
employed as a letter-box by Dr. John Hill, for his _Inspector_. In
1769, Tomkyns was succeeded by his waiter, Campbell, as proprietor
of the tavern and lion’s head, and by him the latter was retained
until November 8, 1804, when it was purchased by Mr. Charles
Richardson, of Richardson’s Hotel, for 17£ 10s., who also possessed
the original sign of the Shakspeare’s Head. After Mr. Richardson’s
death in 1827, the Lion’s Head devolved to his son, of whom it was
bought by the Duke of Bedford, and deposited at Woburn Abbey, where
it still remains.

Pope was subjected to much annoyance and insult at Button’s. Sir
Samuel Garth wrote to Gay, that everybody was pleased with Pope’s
Translation, “but a few at Button’s;” to which Gay adds, to Pope,
“I am confirmed that at Button’s your character is made very free
with, as to morals, etc.”

[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE AT BUTTON'S COFFEE HOUSE--1730

From a drawing by Hogarth. The man opposite the seated figure is thought
to be Pope]

Cibber, in a letter to Pope, says: “When you used to pass your
hours at Button’s, you were even there remarkable for your
satirical itch of provocation; scarce was there a gentleman of any
pretension to wit, whom your unguarded temper had not fallen upon
in some biting epigram, among which you once caught a pastoral
Tartar, whose resentment, that your punishment might be
proportionate to the smart of your poetry, had stuck up a birchen
rod in the room, to be ready whenever you might come within reach
of it; and at this rate you writ and rallied and writ on, till you
rhymed yourself quite out of the coffee-house.” The “pastoral
Tartar” was Ambrose Philips, who, says Johnson, “hung up a rod at
Button’s, with which he threatened to chastise Pope.”

Pope, in a letter to Crags, thus explains the affair: “Mr. Philips
did express himself with much indignation against me one evening at
Button’s Coffee-house (as I was told), saying that I was entered
into a cabal with Dean Swift and others, to write against the Whig
interest, and in particular to undermine his own reputation and
that of his friends, Steele and Addison; but Mr. Philips never
opened his lips to my face, on this or any like occasion, though I
was almost every night in the same room with him, nor ever offered
me any indecorum. Mr. Addison came to me a night or two after
Philips had talked in this idle manner, and assured me of his
disbelief of what had been said, of the friendship we should always
maintain, and desired I would say nothing further of it. My Lord
Halifax did me the honour to stir in this matter, by speaking to
several people to obviate a false aspersion, which might have done
me no small prejudice with one party. However, Philips did all he
could secretly to continue to report with the Hanover Club, and
kept in his hands the subscriptions paid for me to him, as
secretary to that Club. The heads of it have since given him to
understand, that they take it ill; but (upon the terms I ought to
be with such a man) I would not ask him for this money, but
commissioned one of the players, his equals, to receive it. This is
the whole matter; but as to the secret grounds of this malignity,
they will make a very pleasant history when we meet.”

Another account says that the rod was hung up at the bar of
Button’s, and that Pope avoided it by remaining at home–”his
usual custom.” Philips was known for his courage and superior
dexterity with the sword; he afterwards became justice of the
peace, and used to mention Pope, whenever he could get a man in
authority to listen to him, as an enemy to the Government.

At Button’s the leading company, particularly Addison and Steele,
met in large flowing flaxen wigs. Sir Godfrey Kneller, too, was a
frequenter.

The master died in 1731, when in the _Daily Advertiser_, October 5
appeared the following:

“On Sunday morning, died, after three days’ illness, Mr. Button,
who formerly kept Button’s Coffee-house, in Russell-street, Covent
Garden: a very noted house for wits, being the place where the Lyon
produced the famous _Tatlers_ and _Spectators_, written by the late
Mr. Secretary Addison and Sir Richard Steele, Knt., which works
will transmit their names with honour to posterity.”

* * * * *

Among other wits who frequented Button’s were Swift, Arbuthnot,
Savage, Budgell, Martin Folkes, and Drs. Garth and Armstrong. In
1720, Hogarth mentions “four drawings in Indian ink” of the
characters at Button’s Coffee-house. In these were sketches of
Arbuthnot, Addison, Pope (as it is conjectured) and a certain Count
Viviani, identified years afterwards by Horace Walpole, when the
drawings came under his notice. They subsequently came into
Ireland’s possession.

Jemmy Maclaine, or M’Clean, the fashionable highwayman, was a
frequent visitor at Button’s. Mr. John Taylor, of the _Sun_
newspaper, describes Maclaine as a tall, showy, good-looking man. A
Mr. Donaldson told Taylor that, observing Maclaine paid particular
attention to the barmaid of the Coffee-house, the daughter of the
landlord, he gave a hint to the father of Maclaine’s dubious
character. The father cautioned the daughter against the
highwayman’s addresses, and imprudently told her by whose advice he
put her on her guard; she as imprudently told Maclaine. The next
time Donaldson visited the coffee-room, and sitting in one of the
boxes, Maclaine entered, and in a loud tone said, “Mr. Donaldson, I
wish to _spake_ to you in a private room.” Mr. D. being unarmed,
and naturally afraid of being alone with such a man, said, in
answer, that as nothing could pass between them that he did not
wish the whole world to know, he begged leave to decline the
invitation. “Very well,” said Maclaine, as he left the room, “we
shall meet again.” A day or two after, as Mr. Donaldson was walking
near Richmond, in the evening, he saw Maclaine on horseback; but
fortunately, at that moment, a gentleman’s carriage appeared in
view, when Maclaine immediately turned his horse towards the
carriage, and Donaldson hurried into the protection of Richmond as
fast as he could. But for the appearance of the carriage, which
presented better prey, it is possible that Maclaine would have shot
Mr. Donaldson immediately.

Maclaine’s father was an Irish Dean; his brother was a Calvinist
minister in great esteem at the Hague. Maclaine himself had been a
grocer in Welbeck-street, but losing a wife that he loved
extremely, and by whom he had one little girl, he quitted his
business with two hundred pounds in his pockets which he soon
spent, and then took to the road with only one companion, Plunket,
a journeyman apothecary.

Maclaine was taken in the autumn of 1750, by selling a laced
waistcoat to a pawnbroker in Monmouth-street, who happened to carry
it to the very man who had just sold the lace. Maclaine impeached
his companion, Plunket, but he was not taken. The former got into
verse: Gray, in his “Long Story,” sings:

A sudden fit of ague shook him;
He stood as mute as poor M’Lean.

Button’s subsequently became a private house, and here Mrs.
Inchbald lodged, probably, after the death of her sister, for whose
support she practised such noble and generous self-denial. Mrs.
Inchbald’s income was now 172£ a year, and we are told that she now
went to reside in a boarding-house, where she enjoyed more of the
comforts of life. Phillips, the publisher, offered her a thousand
pounds for her Memoirs, which she declined. She died in a
boarding-house at Kensington, on the 1st of August, 1821, leaving
about 6,000£ judiciously divided amongst her relatives. Her simple
and parsimonious habits were very strange. “Last Thursday,” she
writes, “I finished scouring my bedroom, while a coach with a
coronet and two footmen waited at my door to take me an airing.”

“One of the most agreeable memories connected with Button’s,” says
Leigh Hunt, “is that of Garth, a man whom, for the sprightliness
and generosity of his nature, it is a pleasure to name. He was one
of the most amiable and intelligent of a most amiable and
intelligent class of men–the physicians.”

It was just after Queen Anne’s accession that Swift made
acquaintance with the leaders of the wits at Button’s. Ambrose
Philips refers to him as the strange clergyman whom the frequenters
of the Coffee-house had observed for some days. He knew no one, no
one knew him. He would lay his hat down on a table, and walk up and
down at a brisk pace for half an hour without speaking to any one,
or seeming to pay attention to anything that was going forward.
Then he would snatch up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and walk
off, without having opened his lips. The frequenters of the room
had christened him “the mad parson.” One evening, as Mr. Addison
and the rest were observing him, they saw him cast his eyes several
times upon a gentleman in boots, who seemed to be just come out of
the country. At last, Swift advanced towards this bucolic
gentleman, as if intending to address him. They were all eager to
hear what the dumb parson had to say, and immediately quitted their
seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country gentleman, and
in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked him,
“Pray, Sir, do you know any good weather in the world?” After
staring a little at the singularity of Swift’s manner and the
oddity of the question, the gentleman answered, “Yes, Sir, I thank
God I remember a great deal of good weather in my time.”–”That is
more,” replied Swift, “than I can say; I never remember any weather
that was not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry; but, however
God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very
well.”

* * * * *

Sir Walter Scott gives, upon the authority of Dr. Wall, of
Worcester, who had it from Dr. Arbuthnot himself, the following
anecdote–less coarse than the version generally told. Swift was
seated by the fire at Button’s; there was sand on the floor of the
coffee-room, and Arbuthnot, with a design to play upon this
original figure, offered him a letter, which he had been just
addressing, saying at the same time, “There–sand that”–”I have
got no sand,” answered Swift, “but I can help you to a little
_gravel_.” This he said so significantly, that Arbuthnot hastily
snatched back his letter, to save it from the fate of the capital
of Lilliput.

* * * * *

Tom’s Coffee-house in Birchin-lane, Cornhill, though in the main a
mercantile resort, acquired some celebrity from its having been
frequented by Garrick, who, to keep up an interest in the City,
appeared here about twice in a winter at ‘Change time, when it was
the rendezvous of young merchants.

* * * * *

Hawkins says: “After all that has been said of Mr. Garrick, envy
must own that he owed his celebrity to his merit; and yet, of that
himself so diffident, that he practiced sundry little but innocent
arts, to insure the favour of the public:” yet, he did more. When a
rising actor complained to Mrs. Garrick that the newspapers abused
him, the widow replied, “You should write your own criticisms;
David always did.”

* * * * *

One evening, Murphy was at Tom’s, when Colley Cibber was playing at
whist, with an old general for his partner. As the cards were dealt
to him, he took up every one in turn, and expressed his
disappointment at each indifferent one. In the progress of the game
he did not follow suit, and his partner said, “What! have you not a
spade, Mr. Cibber?” The latter, looking at his cards, answered, “Oh
yes, a thousand;” which drew a very peevish comment from the
general. On which, Cibber, who was shockingly addicted to swearing,
replied, “Don’t be angry, for–I can play ten times worse if I
like.”

* * * * *

The celebrated Bedford Coffee-house, in Covent Garden, once
attracted so much attention as to have published, “Memoirs of the
Bedford Coffee-house,” two editions, 1751 and 1763. It stood “under
the Piazza, in Covent Garden,” in the northwest corner, near the
entrance to the theatre, and has long ceased to exist.

* * * * *

In the _Connoisseur_, No. 1, 1754, we are assured that “this
Coffee-house is every night crowded with men of parts. Almost every
one you meet is a polite scholar and a wit. Jokes and bon-mots are
echoed from box to box: every branch of literature is critically
examined, and the merit of every production of the press, or
performance of the theatres, weighed and determined.”

And in the above-named “Memoirs” we read that “this spot has been
signalized for many years as the emporium of wit, the seat of
criticism, and the standard of taste.–Names of those who
frequented the house: Foote, Mr. Fielding, Mr. Woodward, Mr. Leone,
Mr. Murphy, Mopsy, Dr. Arne. Dr. Arne was the only man in a suit of
velvet in the dog-days.”

Stacie kept the Bedford when John and Henry Fielding, Hogarth,
Churchill, Woodward, Lloyd, Dr. Goldsmith and many others met there
and held a gossiping shilling rubber club. Henry Fielding was a
very smart fellow.

The _Inspector_ appears to have given rise to this reign of the
Bedford, when there was placed here the Lion from Button’s, which
proved so serviceable to Steele, and once more fixed the dominion
of wit in Covent Garden.

The reign of wit and pleasantry did not, however, cease at the
Bedford at the demise of the _Inspector_. A race of punsters next
succeeded. A particular box was allotted to this occasion, out of
hearing of the lady of the bar, that the _double entendres_, which
were sometimes very indelicate, might not offend her.

The Bedford was beset with scandalous nuisances, of which the
following letter, from Arthur Murphy to Garrick, April 10, 1768,
presents a pretty picture:

“Tiger Roach (who used to bully at the Bedford Coffee-house because
his name was Roach) is set up by Wilke’s friends to burlesque
Luttrel and his pretensions. I own I do not know a more ridiculous
circumstance than to be a joint candidate with the Tiger. O’Brien
used to take him off very pleasantly, and perhaps you may, from his
representation, have some idea of this important wight. He used to
sit with a half-starved look, a black patch upon his cheek, pale
with the idea of murder, or with rank cowardice, a quivering lip,
and a downcast eye. In that manner he used to sit at a table all
alone, and his soliloquy, interrupted now and then with faint
attempts to throw off a little saliva, was to the following
effect:–’Hut! hut! a mercer’s ‘prentice with a bag-wig;–d—- n
my s—- l, if I would not skiver a dozen of them like larks! Hut!
hut! I don’t understand such airs!–I’d cudgel him back, breast and
belly, for three skips of a louse!–How do you do, Pat? Hut! hut!
God’s blood–Larry, I’m glad to see you; ‘Prentices! a fine thing
indeed!–Hut! hut! How do you do, Dominick!–D—- n my s—- l,
what’s here to do!’ These were the meditations of this agreeable
youth. From one of these reveries he started up one night, when I
was there, called a Mr. Bagnell out of the room, and most
heroically stabbed him in the dark, the other having no weapon to
defend himself with. In this career, the Tiger persisted, till at
length a Mr. Lennard brandished a whip over his head, and stood in
a menacing attitude, commanding him to ask pardon directly. The
Tiger shrank from the danger, and with a faint voice
pronounced–’Hut! what signifies it between you and me? Well! well!
I ask your pardon.’ ‘Speak louder, Sir; I don’t hear a word you
say.’ And indeed he was so very tall, that it seemed as if the
sound, sent feebly from below, could not ascend to such a height.
This is the hero who is to figure at Brentford.”

* * * * *

Foote’s favourite coffee-house was the Bedford. He was also a
constant frequenter of Tom’s, and took a lead in the Club held
there, and already described.

Dr. Barrowby, the well-known newsmonger of the Bedford, and the
satirical critic of the day, has left this whole-length sketch of
Foote:

“One evening (he says) he saw a young man extravagantly dressed out
in a frock suit of green and silver lace, bag-wig, sword, bouquet,
and point ruffles, enter the room (at the Bedford), and immediately
join the critical circle at the upper end. Nobody recognized him;
but such was the ease of his bearing, and the point of humor and
remark with which he at once took up the conversation, that his
presence seemed to disconcert no one, and a sort of pleased buzz of
‘who is he?’ was still going round the room unanswered, when a
handsome carriage stopped at the door; he rose, and quitted the
room, and the servants announced that his name was Foote, and that
he was a young gentleman of family and fortune, a student of the
Inner Temple, and that the carriage had called for him on its way
to the assembly of a lady of fashion”. Dr. Barrowby once turned the
laugh against Foote at the Bedford, when he was ostentatiously
showing his gold repeater, with the remark–’Why, my watch does not
go!’ ‘It soon _will go_,’ quietly remarked the Doctor. Young
Collins, the poet, who came to town in 1744 to seek his fortune,
made his way to the Bedford, where Foote was supreme among the wits
and critics. Like Foote, Collins was fond of fine clothes, and
walked about with a feather in his hat, very unlike a young man who
had not a single guinea he could call his own. A letter of the time
tells us that “Collins was an acceptable companion everywhere; and
among the gentlemen who loved him for a genius, may be reckoned the
Doctors Armstrong, Barrowby, Hill, Messrs. Quin, Garrick, and
Foote, who frequently took his opinions upon their pieces before
they were seen by the public. He was particularly noticed by the
geniuses who frequented the Bedford and Slaughter’s Coffee-houses.”

* * * * *

Ten years later (1754) we find Foote again supreme in his critical
corner at the Bedford. The regular frequenters of the room strove
to get admitted to his party at supper; and others got as near as
they could to the table, as the only humor flowed from Foote’s
tongue. The Bedford was now in its highest repute.

Foote and Garrick often met at the Bedford, and many and sharp were
their encounters. They were the two great rivals of the day. Foote
usually attacked, and Garrick, who had many weak points, was mostly
the sufferer. Garrick, in early life, had been in the wine trade,
and had supplied the Bedford with wine; he was thus described by
Foote as living in Durham-yard, with three quarts of vinegar in the
cellar, calling himself a wine-merchant. How Foote must have abused
the Bedford wine of this period!

One night, Foote came into the Bedford, where Garrick was seated,
and there gave him an account of a most wonderful actor he had just
seen. Garrick was on the tenters of suspense, and there Foote kept
him a full hour. Foote brought the attack to a close by asking
Garrick what he thought of Mr. Pitt’s histrionic talents, when
Garrick, glad of the release, declared that if Pitt had chosen the
stage, he might have been the first actor upon it.

Another night, Garrick and Foote were about to leave the Bedford
together, when the latter, in paying the bill, dropped a guinea;
and not finding it at once, said, “Where on earth can it be gone
to?”–”Gone to the devil, I think,” replied Garrick, who had
assisted in the search.–”Well said, David!” was Foote’s reply,
“let you alone for making a guinea go further than anybody else.”

Churchill’s quarrel with Hogarth began at the shilling rubber club,
in the parlour of the Bedford; when Hogarth used some very
insulting language towards Churchill, who resented it in the
_Epistle_. This quarrel showed more venom than wit. “Never,” says
Walpole, “did two angry men of their abilities throw mud with less
dexterity.”

Woodward, the comedian, mostly lived at the Bedford, was intimate
with Stacie, the landlord, and gave him his (W.’s) portrait, with a
mask in his hand, one of the early pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Stacie played an excellent game at whist. One morning about two
o’clock, one of the waiters awoke him to tell him that a nobleman
had knocked him up, and had desired him to call his master to play
a rubber with him for one hundred guineas. Stacie got up, dressed
himself, won the money, and was in bed and asleep, all within an
hour.

* * * * *

After Macklin had retired from the stage, in 1754, he opened that
portion of the Piazza-houses, in Covent Garden, afterwards known as
the Tavistock Hotel. Here he fitted up a large coffee-room, a
theatre for oratory, and other apartments. To a three-shilling
ordinary he added a shilling lecture, or “School of Oratory and
Criticism;” he presided at the dinner table, and carved for the
company; after which he played a sort of “Oracle of Eloquence.”
Fielding has happily sketched him in his “Voyage to Lisbon”:
“Unfortunately for the fishmongers of London, the Dory only resides
in the Devonshire seas; for could any of this company only convey
one to the Temple of luxury under the piazza, where Macklin, the
high priest, daily serves up his rich offerings, great would be the
reward of that fishmonger.”

In the Lecture, Macklin undertook to make each of his audience an
orator, by teaching him how to speak. He invited hints and
discussions; the novelty of the scheme attracted the curiosity of
numbers; and this curiosity he still further excited by a very
uncommon controversy which now subsisted, either in imagination or
reality, between him and Foote, who abused one another very
openly–”Squire Sammy,” having for his purpose engaged the Little
Theatre in the Haymarket.

Besides this personal attack, various subjects were debated here
in the manner of the Robin Hood Society, which filled the Orator’s
pocket, and proved his rhetoric of some value.

Here is one of his combats with Foote. The subject was Duelling In
Ireland, which Macklin had illustrated as far as the reign of
Elizabeth. Foote cried, “Order;” he had a question to put. “Well,
Sir,” said Macklin, “what have you to say on this subject,” “I
think, Sir” said Foote, “this matter might be settled in a few
words. What o’clock is it, Sir?” Macklin could not possibly see
what the clock had to do with a dissertation upon Duelling, but
gruffly reported the hour to be half-past nine. “Very well,” said
Foote, “about this time of the night every gentleman in Ireland
that can possibly afford it is in his third bottle of claret, and
therefore in a fair way of getting drunk; and from drunkenness
proceeds quarrelling, and from quarrelling, duelling, and so
there’s an end of the chapter.” The company were much obliged to
Foote for his interference, the hour being considered; though
Macklin did not relish this abridgment.

The success of Foote’s fun upon Macklin’s Lectures, led him to
establish a summer entertainment of his own at the Haymarket. He
took up Macklin’s notion of applying Greek tragedy to modern
subjects, and the squib was so successful that Foote cleared by it
500£ in five nights, while the great Piazza Coffee-room in Covent
Garden was shut up, and Macklin in the _Gazette_ as a bankrupt.

But when the great plan of Mr. Macklin proved abortive, when as he
said in a former prologue, upon a nearly similar occasion–

From scheming, fretting, famine and despair.
We saw to grace restor’d an exiled player;

when the town was sated with the seemingly-concocted quarrel
between the two theatrical geniuses, Macklin locked his doors, all
animosity was laid aside, and they came and shook hands at the
Bedford; the group resumed their appearance, and, with a new
master, a new set of customers was seen.

* * * * *

Tom King’s Coffee-house was one of the old night-houses of Covent
Garden Market; it was a rude shed immediately beneath the portico
of St. Paul’s Church, and was one “well known to all gentlemen to
whom beds are unknown.” Fielding in one of his Prologues says:

What rake is ignorant of King’s Coffee-house?

It is in the background of Hogarth’s print of _Morning_ where the
prim maiden lady, walking to church, is soured with seeing two
fuddled _beaux_ from King’s Coffee-house caressing two frail women.
At the door there is a drunken row, in which swords and cudgels are
the weapons[358].

Harwood’s _Alumni Etonenses_, p. 239, in the account of the Boys
elected from Eton to King’s College, contains this entry: “A.D.
1713, Thomas King, born at West Ashton, in Wiltshire, went away
scholar in apprehension that his fellowship would be denied him;
and afterwards kept that Coffee-house in Covent Garden, which was
called by his own name.”

Moll King was landlady after Tom’s death: she was witty, and her
house was much frequented, though it was little better than a shed.
“Noblemen and the first _beaux_,” said Stacie, “after leaving Court
would go to her house in full dress, with swords and bags, and in
rich brocaded silk coats, and walked and conversed with persons of
every description. She would serve chimney-sweepers, gardeners, and
the market-people in common with her lords of the highest rank. Mr.
Apreece, a tall thin man in rich dress, was her constant customer.
He was called Cadwallader by the frequenters of Moll’s.” It is not
surprising that Moll was often fined for keeping a disorderly
house. At length, she retired from business–and the pillory–to
Hempstead, where she lived on her ill-earned gains, but paid for a
pew in church, and was charitable at appointed seasons, and died in
peace in 1747.

* * * * *

The Piazza Coffee-house at the northeastern angle of Covent Garden
Piazza, appears to have originated with Macklin’s; for we read in
an advertisement in the _Publick Adviser_, March 5, 1756; “The
Great Piazza Coffee-room, in Covent Garden.”

The Piazza was much frequented by Sheridan; and here is located the
well-known anecdote told of his coolness during the burning of
Drury-lane Theatre, in 1809. It is said that as he sat at the
Piazza, during the fire, taking some refreshment, a friend of his
having remarked on the philosophical calmness with which he bore
his misfortune, Sheridan replied:

“A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his _own
fireside_.”

* * * * *

Sheridan and John Kemble often dined together at the Piazza, to be
handy to the theatre. During Kemble’s management, Sheridan had
occasion to make a complaint, which brought a “nervous” letter from
Kemble, to which Sheridan’s reply is amusing enough. Thus, he
writes: “that the management of a theatre is a situation capable of
becoming _troublesome_, is information which I do not want, and a
discovery which I thought you made long ago.” Sheridan then treats
Kemble’s letter as “a nervous flight,” not to be noticed seriously,
adding his anxiety for the interest of the theatre, and alluding to
Kemble’s touchiness and reserve; and thus concludes:

“If there is anything amiss in your mind not arising from the
_troublesomeness_ of your situation, it is childish and unmanly not
to disclose it. The frankness with which I have dealt towards you
entitles me to expect that you should have done so.

“But I have no reason to believe this to be the case; and
attributing your letter to a disorder which I know ought not to be
indulged, I prescribe that thou shalt keep thine appointment at the
Piazza Coffee-house, tomorrow at five, and, taking four bottles of
claret instead of three, to which in sound health you might stint
yourself, forget that you ever wrote the letter, as I shall that I
ever received it.”

“R.B. Sheridan.”

The Piazza facade, and interior, were of Gothic design. When the
house was demolished, in its place was built the Floral Hall, after
the Crystal Palace model.

* * * * *

The Chapter Coffee-house was a literary place of resort in
Paternoster Row, more especially in connection with the
Wittinagemot of the last century. A very interesting account of the
Chapter, at a later period (1848) is given by Mrs. Gaskell.

Goldsmith frequented the Chapter, and always occupied one place,
which for many years after was the seat of literary honor there.
There are leather tokens of the Chapter Coffee-house in existence.

* * * * *

Child’s Coffee-house, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, was one of the
_Spectator’s_ houses. “Sometimes,” he says, “I smoke a pipe at
Child’s and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the _Postman_,
overhear the conversation of every table in the room.” It was much
frequented by the clergy; for the _Spectator_, No. 609, notices the
mistake of a country gentleman in taking all persons in scarfs for
Doctors of Divinity, since only a scarf of the first magnitude
entitles him to “the appellation of Doctor from his landlady and
the _Boy at Child’s_.”

Child’s was the resort of Dr. Mead, and other professional men of
eminence. The Fellows of the Royal Society came here. Whiston
relates that Sir Hans Sloane, Dr. Halley and he were once at
Child’s when Dr. H. asked him, W., why he was not a member of the
Royal Society? Whiston answered, because they durst not choose a
heretic. Upon which Dr. H. said, if Sir Hans Sloane would propose
him, W., he, Dr. H., would second it, which was done accordingly.

The propinquity of Child’s to the Cathedral and Doctors’ Commons,
made it the resort of the clergy, and ecclesiastical loungers. In
that respect, Child’s was superseded by the Chapter, in Paternoster
Row.

* * * * *

The London Coffee-house was established previous to the year 1731,
for we find of it the following advertisement:

“May, 1731.

“Whereas, it is customery for Coffee-houses and other
Public-houses, to take 8s. for a quart of Arrack, and 6s. for a
quart of Brandy or Rum, made into Punch:

“This is to give notice,

“That James Ashley has opened on Ludgate Hill, the London
Coffee-house, Punch-house, Dorchester Beer and Welsh Ale Warehouse,
where the finest and best old Arrack, Rum and French Brandy is made
into Punch, with the other of the finest Ingredients–viz., A quart
of Arrack made into Punch for six shillings; and so in proportion
to the smallest quantity, which is half-a-quartern for fourpence
half-penny. A quart of Rum or Brandy made into Punch for four
shillings; and so in proportion to the smallest quantity, which is
half-a-quartern for fourpence half-penny; and gentlemen may have it
as soon made as a gill of Wine can be drawn.”

The premises occupied a Roman site; for, in 1800, in the rear of
the house, in a bastion of the City Wall, was found a sepulchral
monument dedicated to Claudina Martina by her husband, a provincial
Roman soldier; here also were found a fragment of a statue of
Hercules and a female head. In front of the Coffee-house
immediately west of St. Martin’s Church, stood Ludgate.

* * * * *

The London Coffee-house was noted for its publishers’ sales of
stock and copyrights. It was within the rules of the Fleet prison;
and in the Coffee-house were “locked up” for the night such juries
from the Old Bailey Sessions, as could not agree upon verdicts. The
house was long kept by the grandfather and father of Mr. John
Leech, the celebrated artist.

A singular incident occurred at the London Coffee-house, many years
since: Mr. Brayley, the topographer, was present at a party here,
when Mr. Broadhurst, the famous tenor, by singing a high note,
caused a wine-glass on the table to break, the bowl being separated
from the stem.

* * * * *

From _The Kingdom’s Intelligencer_, a weekly paper, published by
authority, in 1662, we learn that there had just been opened a “new
coffee-house,” with the sign of the Turk’s Head, where was sold by
retail “the right coffee-powder,” from 4s. to 6s. 8d. per pound;
that pounded in a mortar, 2s; East Indian berry, 1s. 6d.; and the
right Turkie berry, well garbled, at 3s. “The ungarbled for lesse,
with directions how to use the same.” Also Chocolate at 2s. 6d. per
pound; the perfumed from 4s. to 10s.; “also, Sherbets made in
Turkie, of lemons, roses and violets perfumed; and Tea, or Chaa,
according to its goodness. The house seal is Morat the Great.
Gentlemen customers and acquaintances are (the next New Year’s Day)
invited to the sign of the Great Turk at this new Coffee-house,
where Coffee will be on free cost.” Morat figures as a tyrant in
Dryden’s “Aurung Zebe.” There is a token of this house, with the
sultan’s head, in the Beaufoy collection[359].

Another token in the same collection, is of unusual excellence,
probably by John Roettier. It has on the obverse, Morat ye Great
Men did mee call,–Sultan’s head; reverse, Where eare I came I
conquered all.–In the field, Coffee, Tobacco, Sherbet, Tea,
Chocolate, retail in Exchange Alee. “The word Tea,” says Mr. Burn,
“occurs on no other tokens than those issued from ‘the Great Turk’
Coffee-house, in Exchange alley;” in one of its advertisements,
1662, tea is from 6s. to 60s. a pound.

Competition arose. One Constantine Jennings in Threadneedle-street,
over against St. Christopher’s Church, advertised that coffee,
chocolate, sherbet, and tea, the right Turkey berry, may be had as
cheap and as good of him as is anywhere to be had for money; and
that people may there be taught to prepare the said liquors gratis.

Pepys, in his “Diary,” tells, September 25, 1669, of his sending
for “a cup of Tea, a China Drink, he had not before tasted.” Henry
Bennet, Earl of Arlington, about 1666, introduced tea at Court.
And, in his “Sir Charles Sedley’s Mulberry Garden,” we are told
that “he who wished to be considered a man of fashion always drank
wine-and-water at dinner, and a dish of tea afterwards.” These
details are condensed from Mr. Burn’s excellent “Beaufoy
Catalogue,” 2nd edition, 1855.

* * * * *

In Gerard-street, Soho, also, was another Turk’s Head Coffee-house,
where was held a Turk’s Head Society; in 1777, we find Gibbon
writing to Garrick: “At this time of year (August 14) the Society
of the Turk’s Head can no longer be addressed as a corporate body,
and most of the individual members are probably dispersed: Adam
Smith, in Scotland; Burke in the shades of Beaconsfield; Fox, the
Lord or the devil knows where.”

The place was a kind of headquarters for the Loyal Association
during the Rebellion of 1745. Here was founded “The Literary Club”
and a select body for the Protection and Encouragement of Art.
Another Society of Artists met in Peter’s-court, St. Martin’s-lane,
from the year 1739 to 1769. After continued squabbles, which lasted
for many years, the principal artists met together at the Turk’s
Head, where many others having joined them, they petitioned the
King (George III) to become patron of a Royal Academy of Art. His
Majesty consented; and the new Society took a room in Pall Mall,
opposite to Market-lane, where they remained until the King, in the
year 1771, granted them apartments in Old Somerset House.

* * * * *

The Turk’s Head Coffee-house, No. 142, in the Strand, was a
favourite supping-house with Dr. Johnson and Boswell, in whose Life
of Johnson are several entries, commencing with 1763–”At night,
Mr. Johnson and I supped in a private room at the Turk’s Head
Coffee-house, in the Strand; ‘I encourage this house,’ said he,
‘for the mistress of it is a good civil woman, and has not much
business’.” Another entry is–”We concluded the day at the Turk’s
Head Coffee-house very socially.” And, August 3, 1673–”We had our
last social meeting at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house, before my
setting out for foreign parts.”

The name was afterwards changed to “The Turk’s Head, Canada and
Bath Coffee-house,” and was a well frequented tavern and hotel.

* * * * *

At the Turk’s Head, or Miles’s Coffee-house, New Palace-yard,
Westminster, the noted Rota Club met, founded by Harrington, in
1659; where was a large oval table, with a passage in the middle,
for Miles to deliver his coffee.[360]

* * * * *

For many years previous to the streets of London being completely
paved, “Slaughter’s Coffee-house” was called “The Coffee-house on
the Pavement.” Besides being the resort of artists, Old Slaughter’s
was the house of call for Frenchmen.

St. Martin’s-lane was long one of the headquarters of the artists
of the last century. “In the time of Benjamin West,” says J.T.
Smith, “and before the formation of the Royal Academy,
Greek-street, St. Martin’s-lane, and Gerard-street, was their only
colony. Old Slaughter’s Coffee-house, in St. Martin’s-lane, was
their grand resort in the evenings, and Hogarth was a constant
visitor.” He lived at the Golden Head, on the eastern side of
Leicester Fields, in the northern half of the Sabloniere Hotel. The
head he cut out himself from pieces of cork, glued and bound
together; it was placed over the street-door. At this time, young
Benjamin West was living in chambers, in Bedford-street, Covent
Garden, and had there set up his easel; he was married in 1765, at
St. Martin’s Church. Roubiliac was often to be found at Slaughter’s
in early life; probably before he gained the patronage of Sir
Edward Walpole, through finding and returning to the baronet the
pocket-book of bank-notes which the young maker of monuments had
picked up in Vauxhall Gardens. Sir Edward, to remunerate his
integrity, and his skill, of which he showed specimens, promised to
patronize Roubiliac through life, and he faithfully performed this
promise. Young Gainsborough, who spent three years amid the works
of the painters in St. Martin’s-lane, Hayman, and Cipriani, who
were all eminently convival, were, in all probability, frequenters
of Slaughter’s. Smith tells us that Quin and Hayman were
inseparable friends, and so convival, that they seldom parted till
daylight.

Mr. Cunningham relates that here, “in early life, Wilkie would
enjoy a small dinner at a small cost. I have been told by an old
frequenter of the house, that Wilkie was always the last dropper-in
for dinner, and that he was never seen to dine in the house by
daylight. The truth is, he slaved at his art at home till the last
glimpse of daylight had disappeared.”

Haydon was accustomed, in the early days of his fitful career, to
dine here with Wilkie. In his “Autobiography,” in the year 1808,
Haydon writes: “This period of our lives was one of great
happiness; painting all day, then dining at the Old Slaughter
Chop-house, then going to the Academy until eight to fill up the
evening, then going home to tea–that blessing of a studious
man–talking over respective exploits, what he, Wilkie, had been
doing and what I had been doing, and, then frequently to relieve
our minds fatigued by their eight and twelve hours’ work, giving
vent to the most extraordinary absurdities. Often have we made
rhymes on odd names, and shouted with laughter at each new line
that was added. Sometimes lazily inclined after a good dinner, we
have lounged about, near Drury Lane or Covent Garden, hesitating
whether to go in, and often have I (knowing first that there was
nothing I wished to see) assumed a virtue I did not possess, and
pretending moral superiority, preached to Wilkie on the weakness of
not resisting such temptations for the sake of our art and our
duty, and marched him off to his studies, when he was longing to
see Mother Goose.”

J.T. Smith refers to Old Slaughter’s as “formerly the rendezvous of
Pope, Dryden and other wits, and much frequented by several
eminently clever men of his day.”

Thither came Ware, the architect, who, when a little sickly boy,
was apprenticed to a chimney-sweeper, and was seen chalking the
street-front of Whitehall, by a gentleman who purchased the
remainder of the boy’s time; gave him an excellent education; then
sent him to Italy, and, upon his return, employed him, and
introduced him to his friends as an architect. Ware was heard to
tell this story while he was sitting to Roubiliac for his bust.
Ware built Chesterfield House and several other noble mansions, and
compiled a Palladio, in folio: he retained the soot in his skin to
the day of his death. He was very intimate with Roubiliac, who was
an opposite eastern neighbour of Old Slaughter’s. Another
architect, Gwynn, who competed with Mylne for designing and
building Blackfriars Bridge, was also a frequent visitor at Old
Slaughter’s, as was Gravelot, who kept a drawing-school in the
Strand, nearly opposite to Southampton-street.

Hudson, who painted the Dilettanti portraits; M’Ardell, the
mezzotinto-scraper; and Luke Sullivan, the engraver of Hogarth’s
March to Finchley, also frequented Old Slaughter’s; likewise
Theodore Gardell, the portrait painter, who was executed for the
murder of his landlady: and Old Moser, keeper of the Drawing
Academy in Peter’s-court.

Parry, the Welsh harper, though totally blind, was one of the first
draught-players in England, and occasionally played with the
frequenters of Old Slaughter’s; and here in consequence of a bet.
Roubiliac introduced Nathaniel Smith (father of John Thomas), to
play at draughts with Parry; the game lasted about half an hour;
Parry was much agitated, and Smith proposed to give in; but as
there were bets depending, it was played out, and Smith won. This
victory brought Smith numerous challenges; and the dons of the
Barn, a public-house, in St. Martin’s-lane, nearly opposite the
church, invited him to become a member; but Smith declined. The
Barn, for many years, was frequented by all the noted players of
chess and draughts; and it was there that they often decided games
of the first importance, played between persons of the highest
rank.

* * * * *

The Grecian Coffee-house, Devereux-court, Strand, (closed in 1843)
was named from Constantine, of Threadneedle street, the _Grecian_
who kept it. In the _Tatler_ announcement, all accounts of learning
are to be “under the title of the Grecian;” and, in the _Tatler_,
No. 6: “While other parts of the town are amused with the present
actions (Marlborough’s) we generally spend the evening at this
table (at the Grecian) in inquiries into antiquity, and think
anything new, which gives us new knowledge. Thus, we are making a
very pleasant entertainment to ourselves in putting the actions of
Homer’s Iliad into an exact journal.”

The _Spectator’s_ face was very well known at the Grecian, a
coffee-house “adjacent to the law.” Occasionally it was the scene
of learned discussion. Thus Dr. King relates that one evening, two
gentlemen, who were constant companions, were disputing here,
concerning the accent of a Greek word. This dispute was carried to
such a length, that the two friends thought proper to determine it
with their swords; for this purpose they stepped into
Devereux-court, where one of them (Dr. King thinks his name was
Fitzgerald) was run through the body, and died on the spot.

The Grecian was Foote’s morning lounge. It was handy, too, for the
young Templar, Goldsmith, and often did it echo with Oliver’s
boisterous mirth; for “it had become the favourite resort of the
Irish and Lancashire Templars, whom he delighted in collecting
around him, in entertaining with a cordial and unostentatious
hospitality, and in occasionally amusing with his flute, or with
whist, neither of which he played very well!” Here Goldsmith
occasionally wound up his “Shoemaker’s Holiday” with supper.

It was at the Grecian that Fleetwood Shephard told this memorable
story to Dr. Tancred Robinson, who gave Richardson permission to
repeat it. “The Earle of Dorset was in Little Britain, beating
about for books to his taste: there was ‘Paradise Lost’. He was
surprised with some passages he struck upon, dipping here and there
and bought it; the bookseller begged him to speak in his favour, if
he liked it, for they lay on his hands as waste paper…. Shephard
was present. My Lord took it home, read it, and sent it to Dryden,
who in a short time returned it. ‘This man,’ says Dryden, ‘cuts us
all out, and the ancients, too!’”

* * * * *

George’s Coffee-house, No. 213, Strand, near Temple Bar, was a
noted resort in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When it
was a coffee-house, one day, there came in Sir James Lowther, who
after changing a piece of silver with the coffee-woman, and paying
twopence for his dish of coffee, was helped into his chariot, for
he was very lame and infirm, and went home: some little time
afterwards, he returned to the same coffee-house, on purpose to
acquaint the woman who kept it, that she had given him a bad
half-penny, and demanded another in exchange for it. Sir James had
about £40,000 per annum.

Shenstone, who found “the warmest welcome at an inn,” found
George’s to be economical. “What do you think,” he writes, “must be
my expense, who love to pry into everything of the kind? Why, truly
one shilling. My company goes to George’s Coffee-house, where, for
that small subscription I read all pamphlets under a three
shillings’ dimension; and indeed, any larger would not be fit for
coffee-house perusal.” Shenstone relates that Lord Oxford was at
George’s, when the mob, that were carrying his Lordship in effigy,
came into the box where he was, to beg money of him, amongst
others; this story Horace Walpole contradicts, adding that he
supposes Shenstone thought that after Lord Oxford quitted his place
he went to the coffee-house to learn news.

Arthur Murphy frequented George’s, “where the town wits met every
evening.” Lloyd, the law-student, sings:

By law let others toil to gain renown!
Florio’s a gentleman, a man o’ the town.

He nor courts clients, or the law regarding,
Hurries from Nando’s down to Covent Garden.
Yet, he’s a scholar; mark him in the pit,
With critic catcall sound the stops of wit!
Supreme at George’s, he harangues the throng,
Censor of style, from tragedy to song.

* * * * *

The Percy Coffee-house, Rathbone-place, Oxford-street, no longer
exists; but it will be kept in recollection for its having given
name to one of the most popular publications of its class, namely,
the “Percy Anecdotes,” by Sholto and Reuben Percy, Brothers of the
Benedictine Monastery of Mont Benger, in forty-four parts,
commencing in 1820. So said the title pages, but the names and the
locality were _supposé_. Reuben Percy was Thomas Byerly, who died
in 1824; he was the brother of Sir John Byerley, and the first
editor of the _Mirror_, commenced by John Limbird, in 1822. Sholto
Percy was Joseph Clinton Robertson, who died in 1852; he was the
projector of the _Mechanics’ Magazine_, which he edited from its
commencement to his death. The name of the collection of Anecdotes
was not taken, as at the time supposed, from the popularity of the
“Percy Reliques,” but from the Percy Coffee-house, where Byerley
and Robertson were accustomed to meet to talk over their joint
work. The _idea_ was, however, claimed by Sir Richard Phillips, who
stoutly maintained that it originated in a suggestion made by him
to Dr. Tilloch and Mr. Mayne, to cut the anecdotes from the many
years’ files of the _Star_ newspaper, of which Dr. Tilloch was the
editor; and Mr. Byerley assistant editor; and to the latter
overhearing the suggestion, Sir Richard contested, might the “Percy
Anecdotes” be traced. They were very successful, and a large sum
was realised by the work.

* * * * *

Peele’s Coffee-house, Nos. 177 and 178, Fleet-street, east corner
of Fetter-lane, was one of the coffee-houses of the Johnsonian
period; and here was long preserved a portrait of Dr. Johnson, on
the keystone of a chimney-piece, stated to have been painted by Sir
Joshua Reynolds. Peele’s was noted for files of newspapers from
these dates: _Gazette_, 1759; _Times_, 1780; _Morning Chronicle_,
1773; _Morning Post_, 1773; _Morning Herald_, 1784; _Morning
Advertiser_, 1794; and the evening papers from their commencement.
The house is now a tavern.

_Coffee Literature and Ideals_

The bibliography at the end of this work will serve to indicate the
nature and extent of the general literature of coffee. Not that it is
complete or nearly so; it would require twice the space to include
mention of all the fugitive bits of verse, essays, and miscellaneous
writings in newspapers, and periodicals, dealing with the poetry and
romance, history, chemistry, and physiological effects of coffee. Only
the early works, and the more notable contributions of the last three
centuries, are included in the bibliography; but there is sufficient to
enable the student to analyze the lines of general progress.

A study of the literature of coffee shows that the French really
internationalized the beverage. The English and Italians followed. With
the advent of the newspaper press, coffee literature began to suffer
from its competition.

The complexities of modern life suggest that coffee drinking in
perfection, the esthetics, and a new literature of coffee may once more
become the pleasure of a small caste. Are the real pleasures of life,
the things truly worth while, only to the swift–the most efficient? Who
shall say? Are not some of us, particularly in America, rather prone to
glorify the gospel of work to such an extent that we are in danger of
losing the ability to understand or to enjoy anything else?

Granted that this is so, coffee, already recognized as the most grateful
lubricant known to the human machine, is destined to play another part
of increasing importance in our national life as a kind of national
shock-absorber as well. But its rôle is something more than this,
surely. When life is drab, it takes away its grayness. When life is sad,
it brings us solace. When life is dull, it brings us new inspiration.
When we are a-weary, it brings us comfort and good cheer.

The lure of coffee lies in its appeal to our finer sensibilities; and
signs are not wanting that that pursuit of the long, sweet happiness
that every one is seeking will lead some of us (even in big bustling
America) into footpaths that end in places where coffee will offer much
of its pristine inspiration and charm. It probably will not be a coffee
house anything like that of the long ago, but perhaps it will be a kind
of modernized coffee club. Why not?

[Illustration: A COFFEE HOUSE IN HOLLAND, ABOUT 1650

After the etching by J. Beauvarlet from a painting by Adriaen Van Ostade
(1610-1675), which is said to be the earliest picture of a coffee house
in western Europe]