certainty. The Mufti Djemel-Eddin,
surnamed Dhabani, brought it from Persia to
Aden in the straits of Babelmandel, and not
far from Mocha. He performed that curious
chronological operation known as "flourishing"
towards the latter part of the fifteenth
century; and in 1517 coffee had found its
way from Arabia to Egypt, and from thence,
after the conquest of that country by Sultan
Selini, to Constantinople. At the end of the
sixteenth century one Doctor Rauwolf, a
German botanist, mentioned coffee as a plant
he had met with in his travels in Asia; and
in 1592, Prosper Alpini, a Venetian
physician, in a treatise "De plantis Egypti," gives
a description of the coffee-tree, known in
Egypt under the names of boum, boun, or
ban.

Coffee entered Europe by Italy (probably
by Venice) in 1645, and in 1652 the first
coffee-house was established in London by a
Greek, and in the neighbourhood of Cornhill.
Mr. Peter Cunningham would doubtless be
able to tell with delightful minuteness the
pedigrees and histories of the first coffee-
house keepers; but, necessarily limited as I
am as regards space, I can but briefly glance
at these fathers of the trade. It was long ere
the beverage they sold was brought within
the means of the humble or even of the
middle classes of the population. Coffee was
for very many years essentially a luxury, just
as tea is now in France. This latter beverage,
so common with us as to be almost a necessary
of life, is yet looked upon as something
curiously and wonderfully fashioned by our
neighbours d'outremanche. They serve tea
with great solemnity, and disguise it with
rum and cognac, after the manner of luxurious
washerwomen; and to show how little tea, as
received by us, is understood by the masses
abroad, I need but refer to the famous history
of the tea-party given by Madame Gibou to
Madame Pochet, where tea was made in a
saucepan, was seasoned with salt, vinegar,
and spice, and finally, with a petit bout de
chandelle or candle end!

I don't think that the sour Puritans who
ruled the roast in England when coffee-houses
were first established, could have been great
admirers or partakers of the fragrant berry.
I do not find it on record that either Praise
God Barebones or Nahum Poundtext
eschewed the black-jack and brown ale, or, at
need, a sly flask of strong waters. I fancy
that the buff-coated Puritans and
Independents must have found coffee at best but
a weak and unsatisfactory beverage. Among
the commonalty, moreover, there was an
inveterate prejudice in favour of "jolly good
ale and old " for breakfast; and I do not
wonder that coffee was slow in progressing
in popular favour. It was of foreign origin,
certainly, and had consequently some
undeniable > claims to the patronage of English
gentility, but it was not French (coffee was
not introduced in Paris till 1669), which was a
fatal draw-back, and caused it to be branded
as '''outlandish." Some stout old true blue
Protestants held it to be papistical.

So coffee-shops vegetated modestly in out-
of-the-way city alleys, till in 1660 King
Charles the Second, that most worthless of
good fellows, came back from his travels
with a swarm of good fellows as worthless
as himself behind him, to enjoy his own
(and a little of other people's) again. Coffee
became fashionable. Charles had become
acquainted with its merits in Holland, for the
Dutch were already great coffee-drinkers; the
courtiers were glad to do as the king did, and
the middle classes too happy to imitate their
dear patrons and debtors, the courtiers.
Coffee-houses multiplied. In the old City
alleys and narrow lanes, and notably in the
purlieus of the Exchange; round about
Whitehall, Charing Cross, and Covent Garden,
scores of coffee-houses arose. Merchants
began to discuss their affairs, ship captains
to settle freight and passage, literary men to
abuse each other, and spangled cavaliers to
criticise the ancles of la belle Stuart and the
last lampoon of my Lord Rochester, over
coffee. But it was yet an exotic, a luxury,
foreign, fashionable, and slightly outlandish.
Taverns began to call themselves coffee-houses
for the look of the thing; but the customers
consumed far more beer, wine, and strong
waters, than coffee. Such merry bloods as
Sir Charles Sedley, as the accomplished
Chevalier de Grammont, as the exemplary
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, required rather
stronger stimulants than pure Mocha or full-
flavoured Ceylon, after a night spent at basset
or tric-trac; and, though there were coffee-
houses in Alsatia, the gentlemen adventurers
who resorted to them were greater patrons of
Geneva and aqua vitae, than of the infusion of
which I am writing. With coffee alone they
would have been ill fortified to sally forth to
remove goods, or slit obnoxious gentlemen's
noses in town or country, to beat the City
watch, or batoon impertinent poets. Little
coffee, though within a coffee-shop's walls,
could Doctor Oates, or Captain Dangerfield,
or Master Bedloe, have imbibed, when they
sat down to concoct those gigantic lies which
have come down to posterity in the pages of
history, and on the stones of the Monument.
Stronger stuff than coffee must those bold
Jesuits have swallowed; who, in darkling
coffee-houses met, or are said to have met, to
settle how Charles Stuart should be despatched
with a silver bullet, and how " James " (the
Duke of York) " must go to pot, too." When
"Citt and Bumpkin " met—as I find
circumstantially recounted in a pamphlet of the
period, in a coffee-house—it was over a
"pott of ale," and not over coffee, that they
had that notable discourse " on matters of
religion and government," in which the king
was clearly shown by " Citt " to be the
prime mover in the plot against his own
life, and Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was