While the honour of introducing tea may be disputed between the English and the Dutch, that of coffee remains between the English and the French.  Yet an Italian intended to have occupied the place of honour:  that admirable traveller Pietro della Valle, writing from Constantinople, 1615, to a Roman, his fellow-countryman, informing him that he should teach Europe in what manner the Turks took what he calls “Cahue,” or as the word is written in an Arabic and English pamphlet, printed at Oxford, in 1659, on “the nature of the drink Kauhi or Coffee.”  As this celebrated traveller lived to 1652, it may excite surprise that the first cup of coffee was not drank at Rome; this remains for the discovery of some member of the “Arcadian Society.”  Our own Sandys, at the time that Valle wrote, was also “a traveller,” and well knew what was “Coffa,” which “they drank as hot as they can endure it; it is as black as soot, and tastes not much unlike it; good they say for digestion and mirth.”

It appears by Le Grand’s “Vie privee des Francois,” that the celebrated Thevenot, in 1658, gave coffee after dinner; but it was considered as the whim of a traveller; neither the thing itself, nor its appearance, was inviting:  it was probably attributed by the gay to the humour of a vain philosophical traveller.  But ten years afterwards a Turkish ambassador at Paris made the beverage highly fashionable.  The elegance of the equipage recommended it to the eye, and charmed the women:  the brilliant porcelain cups in which it was poured; the napkins fringed with gold, and the Turkish slaves on their knees presenting it to the ladies, seated on the ground on cushions, turned the heads of the Parisian dames.  This elegant introduction made the exotic beverage a subject of conversation, and in 1672, an Armenian at Paris at the fair-time opened a coffee-house.  But the custom still prevailed to sell beer and wine, and to smoke and mix with indifferent company in their first imperfect coffee-houses.  A Florentine, one Procope, celebrated in his day as the arbiter of taste in this department, instructed by the error of the Armenian, invented a superior establishment, and introduced ices; he embellished his apartment, and those who had avoided the offensive coffee-houses repaired to Procope’s; where literary men, artists, and wits resorted, to inhale the fresh and fragrant steam.  Le Grand says that this establishment holds a distinguished place in the literary history of the times.  It was at the coffee-house of Du Laurent that Saurin, La Motte, Danchet, Boindin, Rousseau, &c., met; but the mild streams of the aromatic berry could not mollify the acerbity of so many rivals, and the witty malignity of Rousseau gave birth to those famous couplets on all the coffee drinkers, which occasioned his misfortune and his banishment.

Such is the history of the first use of coffee and its houses at Paris.  We, however, had the use before even the time of Thevenot; for an English Turkish merchant brought a Greek servant in 1652, who, knowing how to roast and make it, opened a house to sell it publicly.  I have also discovered his hand-bill, in which he sets forth, “The vertue of the coffee-drink, first publiquely made and sold in England, by Pasqua Rosee, in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, at the sign of his own head."[185]