Coffee: a tale (London: printed for H. Curie [sic, for Curll], 1727), [2], xiv, 33pp.; 8°. BL: RB.23.a.5767.ESTCN27164. Extract, pp. 1–33. Hünersdorff

An extended verse satire directed against the rituals and cultural politics of the Low-Church clergy and the Dissenters. The poem extends to 744 lines and makes use of an unusual verse form of dimeter, consisting of two metrical feet, arranged in four-line stanzas. The form imparts a curious and jaunty rhythm to the verses, which at times jars with the complicated subjects in ecclesiastical politics that the poem addresses. The poem’s attitude to the coffee-house is rather old-fashioned, revisiting the seventeenth-century Tory construction of the coffee-house as a site of Low-Church republican sentiment. The poem begins in a light-hearted manner with a comparison between the tavern and the coffeehouse, ‘nests of curs’d Coffee and News!’ (p. 9, l. 2). But until the final few pages (p. 32 on), the tale is dominated by an obscure and ill-tempered attack on Nonconformists and Lowchurchmen.