Opposition to the Coffee House
It is easy to see why the coffee houses at once found favor among men of intelligence in all classes. Until they came, the average Englishman had only the tavern as a place of common resort. But here was a public house offering a non-intoxicating beverage, and its appeal was instant and universal. As a meeting place for the exchange of ideas it soon attained wide popularity. But not without opposition. The publicans and ale-house keepers, seeing business slipping away from them, made strenuous propaganda against this new social center; and not a few attacks were launched against the coffee drink. Between the Restoration and the year 1675, of eight tracts written upon the subject of the London coffee houses, four have the words "character of a coffee house" as part of their titles. The authors appear eager to impart a knowledge of the town's latest novelty, with which many readers were unacquainted.
One of these early pamphlets (1662) was entitled The Coffee Scuffle, and professed to give a dialogue between "a learned knight and a pitifull pedagogue," and contained an amusing account of a house where the Puritan element was still in the ascendant. A numerous company is present, and each little group being occupied with its own subject, the general effect is that of another Babel. While one is engaged in quoting the classics, another confides to his neighbors how much he admires Euclid;
A third's for a lecture, a fourth a conjecture,
A fifth for a penny in the pound.
Theology is introduced. Mask balls and plays are condemned. Others again discuss the news, and are deep in the store of "mercuries" here to be found. One cries up philosophy. Pedantry is rife, and for the most part unchecked, when each 'prentice-boy "doth call for his coffee in Latin" and all are so prompt with their learned quotations that "'t would make a poor Vicar to tremble."
The first noteworthy effort attacking the coffee drink was a satirical broadside that appeared in 1663. It was entitled A Cup of Coffee: or, Coffee in its Colours. It said:
For men and Christians to turn Turks, and think
T'excuse the Crime because 'tis in their drink,
Is more than Magick....
Pure English Apes! Ye may, for ought I know,
Would it but mode, learn to eat Spiders too.
The writer wonders that any man should prefer coffee to canary, and refers to the days of Beaumont, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson. He says:
They drank pure nectar as the gods drink too,
Sublim'd with rich Canary....
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 doth take;
Yet grin, and give ye for the Vine's pure Blood
A loathsome potion, not yet understood,
Syrrop of soot, or Essence of old Shooes,
Dasht with Diurnals and the Books of news?