For men and Christians to turn Turks and think To excuse the crime, because 'tis in their drink! Pure English apes! ye may, for aught I know, Would it but mode--learn to eat spiders too.[186] Should any of your grandsires' ghosts appear In your wax-candle circles, and but hear The name of coffee so much called upon, Then see it drank like scalding Phlegethon; Would they not startle, think ye, all agreed 'Twas conjuration both in word and deed? Or Catiline's conspirators, as they stood Sealing their oaths in draughts of blackest blood, The merriest ghost of all your sires would say, Your wine's much worse since his last yesterday. He'd wonder how the club had given a hop O'er tavern-bars into a farrier's shop, Where he'd suppose, both by the smoke and stench, Each man a horse, and each horse at his drench.-- Sure you're no poets, nor their friends, for now, Should Jonson's strenuous spirit, or the rare Beaumont and Fletcher's, in your round appear, They would not find the air perfumed with one Castalian drop, nor dew of Helicon; When they but men would speak as the gods do, They drank pure nectar as the gods drink too, Sublim'd with rich Canary--say, shall then These less than coffee's self, these coffee-men; These sons of nothing, that can hardly make Their broth, for laughing how the jest does take, Yet grin, and give ye for the vine's pure blood A loathsome potion, not yet understood, Syrop of soot, or essence of old shoes, Dasht with diurnals and the books of news? Other complaints arose from the mixture of the company in the first coffee-houses. In "A Broadside against Coffee, or the Marriage of the Turk," 1672, the writer indicates the growth of the fashion:-- Confusion huddles all into one scene, Like Noah's ark, the clean and the unclean; For now, alas! the drench has credit got, And he's no gentleman who drinks it not. That such a dwarf should rise to such a stature! But custom is but a remove from nature. In "The Women's Petition against Coffee," 1674, they complained that "it made men as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought; that the offspring of our mighty ancestors would dwindle into a succession of apes and pigmies; and on a domestic message, a husband would stop by the way to drink a couple of cups of coffee." It was now sold in convenient penny-worths; for in another poem in praise of a coffee-house, for the variety of information obtained there, it is called "a penny university."