doctrine; and on one occasion, after an anti-coffee
sermon, the pro-coffeeites and the anti-coffeeites
fell to blows, turbans were knocked off, teeth
were violently extracted, central tufts of hair
were violently torn away, and many severe
kicks and blows with turned-up slippers were
administered to the less active of the followers
of the true Prophet. But eventually the
fanatical haters of the infusion of the Mocha
berry, died out, or were bought over by sacks
of the sinful fruit, and the East gave in, with
one voice, its allegiance to the new beverage.

But many antiquaries contend, and apparently
justly, that coffee (first generally used in Persia)
was not in great repute in Arabia until the
reign of Henry the Sixth. Thence it passed to
Egypt and Syria, and in 1511 to Constantinople,
where public coffee-houses were first opened in
1554 (reign of Mary). Lord Bacon, whose
learning was so varied that he seemed to be
"not one but all mankind's epitome," mentions
coffee in his Sylva Sylvarum as a Turkish drink,
black as soot, and of a strong scent, to be
taken when beaten into powder, in very hot
water. The Turks, he says, drink it in their
coffee-houses, which resemble our taverns.
Burton also mentions it later, in King James's
reign; and no doubt Levant travellers had then
begun to talk and write about coffee as a
pleasant and refreshing beverage after food or
after fatigue. In 1641, a young Cretan
gentleman entered himself as student at Balliol
College, Oxford, and introduced the new Turkish
drink among his begowned colleagues.

In 1650, the year after Oliver became
Protector, and grew more powerful than any
crowned king then in Europe, one Jacobs, a
Jew, opened a coffee shop at the Angel, in the
parish of St. Peter in the East, Oxford. Two
years later, Pasqua Rosee, a Dalmatian, from
Ragusa on the Adriatic, coachman to Mr.
Edwards, a Turkey merchant who had brought
him from Smyrna, opened a coffee-house (the
first in England) by his master's wish, in St.
Michael's-alley, Cornhill. Pasqua Rosee's first
hand-bill, headed
''THE VIRTUE OF THE COFFEE DRINK,"
claims for the new beverage (drunk generally
throughout all the Grand Seigneur's dominions)
all the virtues of a quack panacea; it corrected
day; the hand-bill was, no doubt, written for
Rosee by some half-starved apothecary); "it
dried the system without heating or inflaming it;
it fortified the inward heat, and helped digestion;
it quickened the spirits and made the heart
lightsome; its steam was good for sore eyes; it
suppressed inward fumes, therefore cured
headaches, and dispersed defluxions and rheums that
distilled upon the lungs. It dried up dropsy,
gout, and scurvy, it was beneficial to people in
years and children with the king's evil. It was
a great remedy against the spleen and hypochondriac
winds. It prevented drowsiness and made
one fit for business. It was neither laxative
nor astringent, and it made the skin clear and
white." Such were the bold assertions of Pasqua
Rosee, the Ragusan coachman.

The vintners and tavern-keepers, and the men
about town, who liked their fiery Canary and
their strong French wines, were very angry at
the new beverage. And the wits launched their
pen-darts at Rosee hotly and sharply.

The Grub-street poet wrote some rough-hammered
verses, which began:

   A coachman was the first (here) coffee made,
   And ever since the rest drive on the trade.
   "Me no good Engalash," and sure enough,
   He played the quack to salve his poison stuff.
   "Ver boone for de stomach, de congh, de pthisick,"
   And I believe him, for it looks like physic.
   Coffee, a crust is charred into a coal,
   The smell and taste of the mock china bowl,
   Where huff and puff they labour out their lungs,
   Lest, Dives like, they should bewail their tongues.
   And yet they tell you that it will not burn,
   Though, on the skin, the blisters do return,
   Whose furious heat does make the water rise
   And still through the alembics of your eyes.
             *       *        *        *

   And, now, alas! the French have credit got,
   And he's no gentleman that drinks it not.

There can be no doubt that there was at first
a good deal of quackery and nonsense talked
about coffee, and that what with the absurd
injunctions to drink it scalding hot, and the
ridiculous practice of holding the head in the
steam to benefit weak eyes, the satirist and
cynic must have had fair scope for their bitterness
and sourness in the Cornhill coffee-house,
over whose door hung a representation of the
brown visage of Pasqua Rosee.

A penny at the bar, and twopence a cup—
newspapers and lights included—were the
early coffee-house charges. Some old rules
in verse for a coffee-house wall, are still
preserved. They enjoin a fine of twelvepence for
swearing, and a forfeit of a dish of coffee all round
for beginning a quarrel or for toasting a friend
in coffee. No wagers were allowed to exceed
five shillings.

The second coffee-house, according to authority,
was the Rainbow, by the Inner Temple
gate, kept by James Parr, a barber. His
neighbours grew jealous, and in 1657 he was
"presented" as a nuisance, for having annoyed his
neighbours by the smell of scorched coffee, and
having set his chimney and chamber on fire, to
the "general danger and affrightment." In
1660 the returned cavaliers were severe on the
rival of wine, and a duty of fourpence was
levied on every gallon sold. An act of 1663
directed all coffee-houses to be licensed; in 1675
there was a short-lived proclamation closing the
coffee-houses as seminaries of sedition.

The enemies of the new Turkish drink
accused it of the most horrible and baneful
results. The old men lamented Ben Jonson's
times, when men were men, and tossed off
canary. A lampooner of 1663 writes bitterly:
   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,
   Syrup of soot, or essence of old shoes,
   Dasht with diurnals or the book of news!