For about twenty years after the introduction of coffee in this kingdom, we find a continued series of invectives against its adoption, both for medicinal and domestic purposes.  The use of coffee, indeed, seems to have excited more notice, and to have had a greater influence on the manners of the people, than that of tea.  It seems at first to have been more universally used, as it still is on the Continent; and its use is connected with a resort for the idle and the curious:  the history of coffee-houses, ere the invention of clubs, was that of the manners, the morals, and the politics of a people.  Even in its native country, the government discovered that extraordinary fact, and the use of the Arabian berry was more than once forbidden where it grows; for Ellis, in his “History of Coffee,” 1774, refers to an Arabian MS., in the King of France’s library, which shows that coffee-houses in Asia were sometimes suppressed.  The same fate happened on its introduction into England.

Among a number of poetical satires against the use of coffee, I find a curious exhibition, according to the exaggerated notions of that day, in “A Cup of Coffee, or Coffee in its Colours,” 1663.  The writer, like others of his contemporaries, wonders at the odd taste which could make Coffee a substitute for Canary.

    For men and Christians to turn Turks and think
    To excuse the crime, because ’tis in their drink! 
    Pure English apes! ye may, for aught I know,
    Would it but mode—­learn to eat spiders too.[186]
    Should any of your grandsires’ ghosts appear
    In your wax-candle circles, and but hear
    The name of coffee so much called upon,
    Then see it drank like scalding Phlegethon;
    Would they not startle, think ye, all agreed
    ’Twas conjuration both in word and deed? 
    Or Catiline’s conspirators, as they stood
    Sealing their oaths in draughts of blackest blood,
    The merriest ghost of all your sires would say,
    Your wine’s much worse since his last yesterday. 
    He’d wonder how the club had given a hop
    O’er tavern-bars into a farrier’s shop,
    Where he’d suppose, both by the smoke and stench,
    Each man a horse, and each horse at his drench.—­
    Sure you’re no poets, nor their friends, for now,
    Should Jonson’s strenuous spirit, or the rare
    Beaumont and Fletcher’s, in your round appear,
    They would not find the air perfumed with one
    Castalian drop, nor dew of Helicon;
    When they but men would speak as the gods do,
    They drank pure nectar as the gods drink too,
    Sublim’d with rich Canary—­say, 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 does take,
    Yet grin, and give ye for the vine’s pure blood
    A loathsome potion, not yet understood,
    Syrop of soot, or essence of old shoes,
    Dasht with diurnals and the books of news?