And that the virtue and excellence of the leaf and drink are many and great is evident and manifest by the high esteem and use of it (especially of late years) by the physicians and knowing men of France, Italy, Holland, and other parts of Christendom, and in England it hath been sold in the leaf for six pounds, and sometimes for ten pounds the pound-weight; and in respect of its former scarceness and dearness, it hath been only used as a regalia in high treatments and entertainments, and presents made thereof to princes and grandees till the year 1657” (Chambers’s _Book of Days_, vol. ii. p. 666). Rugge’s _Diurnal_ says that tea was sold in every street in London in 1659. That statement we cannot believe, especially when we are reminded that a couple of pounds was a present fit for the King to receive. A couple of pounds of a commodity sold in every street in London? On the contrary, there is every kind of evidence that in the seventeenth century tea was perhaps the fashion, but never became a national beverage. Pepys mentions it once or twice, but tea formed no part of his ordinary diet. Evelyn, I believe, does not mention it at all. In the winter of 1683–1684 the Thames was frozen over, and in the fair that was held upon the river, tea, among other things, was sold. No one, I think, ever imagined that tea would become the national beverage, excluding beer from breakfast and from the afternoon meal. A learned physician, Dr. Lister, writing at the close of the century, says that tea and coffee “are permitted by God’s Providence for lessening the number of mankind by shortening life, as a kind of silent plague.” Many attacks were made upon the tea-table. It took men away from the pipe and bottle; it brought together men and women inclined for vice and gave them an opportunity; it was very costly; it offered a drink only fit for women; it destroyed the strength of man and the beauty of woman. The hostility to tea lingered during the whole of the eighteenth century. In 1652 the first coffee-house was opened in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, by one Pasqua Rosee, a native of Ragusa, servant to a Turkey merchant who brought him from Smyrna. Coffee had been introduced into Oxford a little earlier. The following is a copy of Rosee’s handbill (see Chambers’s _Book of Days_, vol. i. p. 170):— THE VERTUE OF THE COFFEE DRINK _First made and publickly sold in England by Pasqua Rosee._