The numerous contributions by early travelers to the literature of coffee have been mentioned in chronological order in the history chapters. After Rauwolf and Alpini, there were Sir Antony Sherley, Parry, Biddulph, Captain John Smith, Sir George Sandys, Sir Thomas Herbert, and Sir Henry Blount in England; Tavernier, Thévenot, Bernier, P. de la Roque, and Galland in France; Delia Valle in Italy; Olearius and Niebhur in Germany; Nieuhoff in Holland, and others.
Francis Bacon wrote about coffee in his Hist. Vitae et Mortis and Sylva Sylvarum, 1623–27. Burton referred to it in his "Anatomy of Melancholy" in 1632. Parkinson described it in his Theatrum Botanicum in 1640. In 1652, Pasqua Rosée published his famous handbill in London, a literary effort as well as a splendid first advertisement.
Faustus Nairon (Banesius) produced in Rome, in 1671, the first printed treatise devoted solely to coffee. The same year Dufour brought out the first treatise in French. This he followed in 1684 with his work, The manner of making coffee, tea, and chocolate. John Ray extolled the virtues of coffee in his Universal Botany of Plants, published in London in 1686. Galland translated the Abd-al-Kâdir manuscript into French in 1699, and Jean La Roque published his Voyage de l'Arabie Heureuse in Paris in 1715. Excerpts from nearly all these works appear in various chapters of this work.
Leonardus Ferdinandus Meisner published a Latin treatise on coffee, tea, and chocolate in 1721. Dr. James Douglas published in London (1727) his Arbor yemensis fructum cofè ferens, or a description and history of the Coffee Tree. This work laid under contribution many of the Italian, German, French, and English scholars mentioned above; and the author mentioned as other sources of information: Dr. Quincy, Pechey, Gaudron, de Fontenelle, Professor Boerhaave, Figueroa, Chabraeus, Sir Hans Sloane, Langius, and Du Mont.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the poets and dramatists of France, Italy, and England found a plentiful supply in what had already been written on coffee; to say nothing of the inspiration offered by the drink itself, and by the society of the cafés of the period.
French poets, familiar with Latin, first took coffee as the subject of their verse. Vaniére sang its praises in the eighth book of his Praedium rusticum; and Fellon, a Jesuit professor of Trinity College, Lyons, wrote a didactic poem called, Faba Arabica, Carmen, which is included in the Poemata didascalica of d'Olivet.
Abbé Guillaume Massieu's Carmen Caffaeum, composed in 1718, has been referred to in chapter III. It was read at the Academy of Inscriptions. One of the panegyrists of this author, de Boze, in his Elogé de Massieu, says that if Horace and Virgil had known of coffee, the poem might easily have been attributed to them; and Thery, who translated it into French, says "it is a pearl of elegance in a rare jewel case."
The following translation of the poem from the Latin original was made for this work:
Coffee