Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 110, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 September 1904 — The Old English Coffee Houses. [ARTICLE]

The Old English Coffee Houses.

In 1667, we are told, the first coffee house had been prosecuted as a nuisance. In 1706 there were three thousand coffee houses, Tmd each coffee house had its habitual circle. There were coffee houses frequented by merchants and stock Jobbers carrying on the game which suggested the new nicknames bulls and bears, and coffee houses where the talk was Whig and Tory, of the last election and change of ministry, and literary resorts such as the Grecian, where, as wc are told, a fatal duel was provoked by a dispute over a Greek accent, in which, let us Lope, It was the worst scholar who was killed, und Wills’ where Pope as a boy went to look reverently at Dryden, and Buttons,’ where at a later period Addison met his little senate. Addison, according to Pope, spent five or six hours a day lounging at Buttons’, while Pope found the practice and the consequent consumption of wine too much for bis health. Tliackeray notices how the club and coffee house “boozing” shortened the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of those days.