English literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- Anecdotes; Litterateurs
mild streams of the aromatic berry could not mollify the acerbity of so
many rivals, and the witty malignity of Rousseau gave birth to those
famous couplets on all the coffee drinkers, which occasioned his
misfortune and his banishment.
Such is the history of the first use of coffee and its houses at Paris.
We, however, had the use before even the time of Thevenot; for an
English Turkish merchant brought a Greek servant in 1652, who, knowing
how to roast and make it, opened a house to sell it publicly. I have
also discovered his hand-bill, in which he sets forth, "The vertue of
the coffee-drink, first publiquely made and sold in England, by Pasqua
Rosee, in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, at the sign of his own
head."[185]
For about twenty years after the introduction of coffee in this kingdom,
we find a continued series of invectives against its adoption, both for
medicinal and domestic purposes. The use of coffee, indeed, seems to
have excited more notice, and to have had a greater influence on the
manners of the people, than that of tea. It seems at first to have been
more universally used, as it still is on the Continent; and its use is
connected with a resort for the idle and the curious: the history of
coffee-houses, ere the invention of clubs, was that of the manners, the
morals, and the politics of a people. Even in its native country, the
government discovered that extraordinary fact, and the use of the
Arabian berry was more than once forbidden where it grows; for Ellis, in
his "History of Coffee," 1774, refers to an Arabian MS., in the King of
France's library, which shows that coffee-houses in Asia were sometimes
suppressed. The same fate happened on its introduction into England.
Among a number of poetical satires against the use of coffee, I find a
curious exhibition, according to the exaggerated notions of that day, in
"A Cup of Coffee, or Coffee in its Colours," 1663. The writer, like
others of his contemporaries, wonders at the odd taste which could make
Coffee a substitute for Canary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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