ABSTRACT
A folio prose satire replying to The Character of a Coffee-House, with the Symptomes of a Town-Wit (see above, pp. 81–90), mimicking its physical appearance, and satirising the debased intellectual attitudes of the writer of ‘Characters’. This text begins with a defence of the medicinal properties of coffee, describing the ‘salutiferous’ or health-giving properties of coffee using the ancient humoural theory to describe the effects of coffee on the human body. The humoural analysis of coffee offered here broadly follows that contained in a contemporary compilation of coffee scholarship, The Vertues of Coffee (1663; see Volume 4, pp. 75–84), which reprinted excerpts on the natural history of coffee by Bacon, Parkinson, Sandys and Howell. Building on this information, the author then develops an apology for the sociability of the coffee-house, suggesting that, contra its detractors, the coffee-house is cheap, given to sobriety, and an encouragement to trade. Furthermore, coffee-house discourse is modest, and knowledgeable, and does not deserve its reputation for sedition, gossip or ‘Irreverent reflections on Affairs of State’. As the pampleteer recognises, coffee-houses had been repeatedly identified as locations for the dissemination of unofficial news and intelligence critical of the court, becoming a matter of concern for the authorities throughout the 1670s and the Succession Crisis of the early 1680s. In defending the civic and refined tone of coffee-house conversations, the pamphleteer writes an apology not only for the coffee-houses, but the new urban Restoration culture of which they are emblematic.
