While the honour of introducing tea may be disputed between the English and the Dutch, that of coffee remains between the English and the French. Yet an Italian intended to have occupied the place of honour: that admirable traveller Pietro della Valle, writing from Constantinople, 1615, to a Roman, his fellow-countryman, informing him that he should teach Europe in what manner the Turks took what he calls "Cahué," or as the word is written in an Arabic and English pamphlet, printed at Oxford, in 1659, on "the nature of the drink Kauhi or Coffee." As this celebrated traveller lived to 1652, it may excite surprise that the first cup of coffee was not drank at Rome; this remains for the discovery of some member of the "Arcadian Society." Our own Sandys, at the time that Valle wrote, was also "a traveller," and well knew what was "Coffa," which "they drank as hot as they can endure it; it is as black as soot, and tastes not much unlike it; good they say for digestion and mirth."
It appears by Le Grand's "Vie privée des François," that the celebrated Thevenot, in 1658, gave coffee after dinner; but it was considered as the whim of a traveller; neither the thing itself, nor its appearance, was inviting: it was probably attributed by the gay to the humour of a vain philosophical traveller. But ten years afterwards a Turkish ambassador at Paris made the beverage highly fashionable. The elegance of the equipage recommended it to the eye, and charmed the women: the brilliant porcelain cups in which it was poured; the napkins fringed with gold, and the Turkish slaves on their knees presenting it to the ladies, seated on the ground on cushions, turned the heads of the Parisian dames. This elegant introduction made the exotic beverage a subject of conversation, and in 1672, an Armenian at Paris at the fair-time opened a coffee-house. But the custom still prevailed to sell beer and wine, and to smoke and mix with indifferent company in their first imperfect coffee-houses. A Florentine, one Procope, celebrated in his day as the arbiter of taste in this department, instructed by the error of the Armenian, invented a superior establishment, and introduced ices; he embellished his apartment, and those who had avoided the offensive coffee-houses repaired to Procope's; where literary men, artists, and wits resorted, to inhale the fresh and fragrant steam. Le Grand says that this establishment holds a distinguished place in the literary history of the times. It was at the coffee-house of Du Laurent that Saurin, La Motte, Danchet, Boindin, Rousseau, &c., met; but the 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.
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."
Amidst these contests of popular prejudices, between the lovers of forsaken Canary, and the terrors of our females at the barrenness of an Arabian desert, which lasted for twenty years, at length the custom was universally established; nor were there wanting some reflecting minds desirous of introducing the use of this liquid among the labouring classes of society, to wean them from strong liquors. Howell, in noticing that curious philosophical traveller, Sir Henry Blount's "Organon Salutis," 1659, observed that "this coffa-drink hath caused a great sobriety among all nations: formerly apprentices, clerks, &c., used to take their morning draughts in ale, beer, or wine, which often made them unfit for business. Now they play the good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink. The worthy gentleman, Sir James Muddiford, who introduced the practice hereof first in London, deserves much respect of the whole nation." Here it appears, what is most probable, that the use of this berry was introduced by other Turkish merchants, besides Edwards and his servant Pasqua. But the custom of drinking coffee among the labouring classes does not appear to have lasted; and when it was recently even the cheapest beverage, the popular prejudices prevailed against it, and ran in favour of tea. The contrary practice prevails on the continent, where beggars are viewed making their coffee in the street. I remember seeing the large body of shipwrights at Helvoetsluys summoned by a bell, to take their regular refreshment of coffee; and the fleets of Holland were not then built by arms less robust than the fleets of Britain.