But Faith will nerve thee for the light
Against misfortune's darkening power;
And flood thy road with tempered light,
Until thou reach, in Heaven, that hour
When Prescience shall be thine at will—
Prescience of good unmixed with ill.

A CUP OF COFFEE.

"RACINE " writes lively Madame de Sevigné
to Madame de Grignan—as lively, perchance,
though less known—" passera comme le café."
It is somewhat difficult to find a satisfactory
equivalent for this verb passer, albeit its
literal translation into English is easy. Things
in England, go in and out of fashion; dogs
have their day, and actors strut and fret their
hour here; but it is the especial privilege of
things French—costumes, governments,
literary and artistic celebrities—to pass, to pass
clean away, out of sight, out of mind; to sink
down below the very lowest Nathaniel, to
stick in the mud at the bottom of Lethe till
they are devoured by the fishes of
forgetfulness. So prophesied the sparkling letter-
writer of the Grand Siècle; and, curiously,
with all her sparkle and all her wit, the
lively Madame de Sevigné has been, and is in
greater danger of passing than either coffee
or Racine. The Cid, the Andromaque, of the
meek and tender dramatist yet keep high
state on the time-honoured boards of the
Comédie Française; and although there is a
little too much powder and whalebone, and
Louis Quatorze pomp and vanity about them,
it will be long, I hope, ere we cease to weep
' at and to applaud the genius of Racine. As
for coffee, the revenue returns, the bills,
advertisements, and pictorial vans of that
enterprising tradesman, who has somehow mixed
up St. Paul's Cathedral with the coffee
question, and the extraordinary number of
establishments to which I am indebted for the
title of this paper, show that coffee, at any
rate, is in no danger of passing away. It is
strong, lusty, and well to do just now, a little
put upon and maligned by chicory and
roasted corn, but still thriving and full of
promise.

It is puzzling to know how people could
have managed in the days when there was
neither tea nor coffee. How could they
breakfast? How could clerks and workmen
come home to their tea, when there was no
tea for them to come to? What did the old
maids and the dowagers talk scandal over? But,
as the discussion of this question would lead
us into all sorts of by-roads of speculation
respecting what people eat when there were
no potatoes, what they smoked before the
discovery of Virginia, how gentlemen could
have existed fifty years ago without soda-
water, express trains, and Bell's Life in
London, and ladies without eau de cologne,
Berlin wool, or crenoljne, I must be content
to assume that mankind, not yet acquainted
with the blessings of coffee or coffee-shops,
were contented to do what the inhabitants of
the Isle of Man are proverbially reported to
do now, not as they would, but as they
could.

Does any one know for a certainty who first
discovered coffee, or first found out the means
of converting it into the beverage we drink?
The question has always been a vexed one;
and whole libraries of abusive erudition have
been written on it. Cæsar, with all the
summa diligentia with which he entered Gaul,
did not bring coffee with him; nor did it
come over to England with the Conqueror,
with whom so many nice little agents of
civilisation, including primogeniture,
mortmain, the game-laws, and law French came
over. The origin of coffee as a beverage is
enveloped in a fog of amazing thickness.
Some sages have declared that the Nepenthes,
of which Homer speaks in the Iliad and
which Helen served to Telemachus, was coffee.
Nor quite so unreasonable is the supposition
that the kali, mentioned in Scripture, of which
Abigail offered five measures to the warriors
who accompanied King David, was identical
with the kawa, kapu, or cavé, afterwards
known to the Orientals, and familiar to us as
coffee. The rabbis, however, declare the kali
to have been burnt barley, which assertion
would seem at first to be fatal to the pretensions
of coffee; but, considering how much of
the coffee of the present day is burnt beans,
the rabbis may not have been so far wrong
after all. According to the Mahometan
traditions, coffee was revealed to Mahomet by
the angel Gabriel: but, if we are to believe
Ahmet Effendi, whose antecedents do not
give me any reason to think him so prodigious
a liar as Mahomet, it was not till the thir-
teenth century, and by a dervish of the order
of Schazilys, (whatever that may be,) that the
coffee-tree was discovered or its properties
made known. Brillat Savarin attributes the
discovery of the coffee-berry to an Arabian
farmer, in the seventh century, who
remarked that his cattle were always more
lively and excited after they had been
browsing on a certain shrub; and his
solution of the question has been the generally
received one in our modern cyclopædias,
treasuries of information, and " guides to
knowledge." With all due respect, however,
for the undoubted authority of the author of
the Physiologie du Gout, I cannot accord to
his coffee theory any greater degree of
credence than to Charles Lamb's account
of the Origin of Roast Pig. Be it as
it may, coffee must have been discovered,
and the decoction therefrom invented, at
some time and by some one. It is not
impossible that the Chinese will one day claim
the honour of the discovery, together with
that of gunpowder and the printing press:
meanwhile, we will continue to drink coffee
and be thankful.

Of the history of coffee and coffee-shops I
am enabled to speak with somewhat more