Woolnoth, The Coffee Scuffle, Occasioned by a Contest Between a Learned Knight, and a Pitifull Pedagogue. With The Character of a Coffee-House (Lodon [sic], printed and are to be sold at the Latine Coffee House near the Stocks, 1662), [18]pp.; 8°. BL: 11622.bb.11. ESTCR186857

A ballad satire detailing a vociferous dispute about the works of Hugo Grotius between two coffee-house debaters, that casts light on the nature of coffee-house discussion and, inter alia, learning, philosophy and puritan politics in the early years of the Restoration. The text comprises 93 numbered 4-line stanzas in the typical form of the oral ballad, with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines (with the first and third line having an internal rhyme). The verses are mock heroic, using the high style of the romance ballad to ridicule the protagonists’ claims to learning. The first 27 stanzas describe in satirical terms the topics discussed in the coffee-house, mocking especially the diversity and range of subjects addressed there, from politics to science, from quotidian events to sectarian disputes. After describing the coffee-man and his wares (stanzas 27–31) the main protagonists are introduced. On one side is a ‘dull Pedagog’ or school master called Evans (described stanzas 35–54), sitting at a table in the coffee-room like a King surrounded by petitions and paper. The rest of the poem concerns his dispute (stanzas 55–93) with the ‘learned Knight’, Sir James Langham, who poses the coffee-house a query, asking why Holland produced such good scholars compared to England. This leads to a panegyrical description of the poetry, philosophy and scholarship of Hugo Grotius, a Dutch Arminian Calvinist influential in English intellectual circles (stanzas 65–75). The poem concludes with Evans’s intemperate attack on Grotius and Langham.