James Miller, The Coffee-House. A Dramatick Piece. As it is Perform’d at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. By His Majesty’s Servants (London, J. Watts, 1737), [12], 38pp.; 8°. BL: 80.c.18.(1). ESTCT15.

A sentimental comedy set in a coffee-house, Miller’s play caused a considerable scandal. Some of the audience, conspicuously students at the Temple, claimed to identify Mrs Notable and Kitty as ‘Mrs Yarrow and her Daughter who kept Dick’s Coffee-house near Temple-Bar, and were at that celebrated Toasts, together with several persons who frequented that House, were intended to be ridiculed by the Author’. Miller denied that any resemblance was intended, defending himself by claiming that the plot was derived from a French play called Le Caff é by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. When the play was published, ‘the Engraver who had been employed to compose a Frontispiece, having inadvertently fixed on that very Coffee-house for the scene of his Drawing, the Templers, with whom the above-mentioned Ladies were great Favorites, became, by this Accident, so confirmed in their Suspicions, that they united to damn this Piece’; David Erskine Baker, The Companion to the Play-house: or, an historical account of all the dramatic writers (and their works) that have appeared in Great Britain and Ireland, 2 vols (London, T. Becket and P. Dehondt, 1764). The French original proposed by Miller was the first work by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1670–1741). Le Caff é, Comédie en un Acte et en Prose, was first performed on 2 August 1694 in Paris and subsequently published in 1734 in London in Supplement aux oeuvres de Mr. Rousseau (London, Jacob Tonson and Jean Watts, 1734), the same publisher as Miller used (see Oeuvres de J.B. Rousseau, 5 vols (Paris, Lefèvre, Libraire, 1820), vol. IV, pp. 95–142). Miller’s suggestion that the plot of his play is drawn from Rousseau’s play is tenable: both concern a love-tangle involving a coffee-woman and her daughter (Mrs Jerome and Lousion), but while many scenes are direct translations of Rousseau’s comedy, there is much new material too.