Most of all, the gay world coveted the services of exquisite porcelain and silver, the napkins fringed with bullion, and—served in cups of egg-shell porcelain, hot, strong, and fragrant—that delicious coffee which has never lost the place it then secured. On bended knees the slaves of the ambassador presented the choicest Mocha to these grande dames, who fluttered their fans with many grimaces and bent their piquant faces—bepatched, bepowdered, and berouged—over the steaming beverage. Such were the half-barbaric occasions upon which coffee first became generally known to that nation which is now so largely dependent upon the tiny brown berry of Arabia. Four years afterward an Armenian opened the first coffee-house to the Parisian public. Others followed his example, and a little later beer and wine were also served at the same establishments. Finer than any of his predecessors came a dusky Italian from Florence, and to his salon flocked the chief literary men of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Coffee became a tyrant, and, as tyrant, it still holds matutinal and undisputed sway over the civilized portions of the earth.
Common as it is in this age, it was then an expensive luxury. The cultivation of the plant was confined to small districts, navigation tedious, and commerce with the East restricted. It is recorded that the daughters of King Louis of France had coffee imported for the use of the royal household at a cost of £3,200 yearly,—a fact which, after making all due allowance, shows that "rings" must have existed as far back as two centuries ago. The exact date of the introduction of coffee into England is not known. It is supposed to have been about the middle of the seventeenth century, and it became a popular drink there earlier than in France. Perhaps this may be due to the fact that the first English merchant who dealt in coffee had lived in Constantinople, and brought back with him to London a pretty Greek wife, who acted as his saleswoman. At first it sold for four or five guineas per pound, but soon became cheaper.
Coffee-houses multiplied, not only in the capital, but in all the large cities. Long antedating common newspapers, these shops were news centers, where the intelligent men of the age gathered to learn what was taking place, to discuss public affairs and governmental measures, and form public opinion. Considering that they were hot-beds of sedition and revolution, Charles II. ordered them closed in 1675, but the order was soon revoked. Cromwell ordered them closed again during the Protectorate for reasons somewhat similar; but they had become necessities to the people, and could not be put down for any great length of time.
Wits and poets, essayists and philosophers, daily gathered in the coffee-houses of London during several generations. How much they quoted from favorite authors—how faithfully they harangued and button-holed each other in that fashion, common to all ages, from the cloudy eras of the Chimpanzees to the year of our Lord 1887—there are no annals full enough to describe. Within their precincts, what fear and folly, what foolishness and wisdom, have been uttered over steaming cups of Mocha!
It was at Will's Coffee-house, Covent Garden, that Dryden and Addison, Steele and Davenant, Carey and Pope, met with other luminaries, and if it be proven that other potations, more fiery and deep, mingled with those of the Eastern berry, it may well be surmised that coffee often supplied the place of worse beverages, or mitigated their evil effects. The "intellectual drink," as it has been called, gained friends every day among the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Here Pope found the inspiration of "The Rape of the Lock," if not the "Essay on Man," an inspiration which he celebrated in these lines:
"From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,
While China's earth receives the smoking tide;
At once they gratify their sense and taste,
And frequent cups prolong the rich repast.
Coffee!—which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes!"
Prior to the year 1700, coffee planting had been confined to Africa. The preceding year the President of the Dutch East Indies had brought some of the shrubs to Batavia, and Java rapidly became one of the first coffee-bearing countries—now exporting more than 75,000 tons annually. A shrub was sent from Batavia to Amsterdam shortly after, and in 1710 a shoot from this plant was taken as a curiosity to Louis XIV., who had it carefully tended in the Jardin des Plants, where it flourished for some years.
But, with the development of the New World, coffee was a necessary concomitant. Across the stormy ocean, to the Island of Martinique, the Grand Monarch sent three plants in 1720, only one of which survived the voyage, and from this one shrub have sprung all the rich and expensive plantations of the West Indies and Central and South America.
It was not till the year 1754 that the first coffee tree was planted by a friar in the garden of the convent to which he was attached in Rio Janeiro, and not till 1809 did the first cargo of coffee land on the shores of the United States. Now, three-quarters of our coffee comes from Brazil, although much of it is sold under the name of Mocha or Java, the Chamber of Commerce report itself declaring that the "Santos pea berry and other similar appearing beans are used by mixers to supplement the supply of genuine Mocha." It would be a gratification to be able to say that no other mixing or adulteration is practiced.