a part of the menu.

He makes countless references to visits paid to this and that coffee
house, but records only one instance of actually drinking coffee:

Up betimes to my office, and thence at seven o'clock to Sir G.
Carteret, and there with Sir J. Minnes made an end of his accounts,
but staid not to dinner my Lady having made us drink our morning
draft there of several wines, but I drank nothing but some of her
coffee, which was poorly made, with a little sugar in it.

This note which he considered worthy of record was certainly not
inspired by the excellence of the good lady's matutinal coffee.

William Cobbett (1762-1835) the English-American politician, reformer,
and writer on economics, denounced coffee as "slops"; but he was one of
a remarkably small minority. Before his day, one of England's greatest
satirists, Dean Swift, (1667-1745) led a long roll of literary men who
were devotees of coffee.

Swift's writings are full of references to coffee; and his letters from
Stella came to him under cover, at the St. James coffee house. There is
scarcely a letter to Esther (Vanessa) Vanhomrigh which does not contain
a significant reference to coffee, by which the course of their
friendship and clandestine meetings may be traced. In one dated August
13, 1720, written while traveling from place to place in Ireland, he
says:

We live here in a very dull town, every valuable creature absent,
and Cad says he is weary of it, and would rather prefer his coffee
on the barrenest mountain in Wales than be king here.

A fig for partridges and quails,
Ye dainties I know nothing of ye;
But on the highest mount in Wales,
Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.

In another letter, about two years later, replying to one in which
Vanessa has reproached him and begged him to write her soon, he advises:

The best maxim I know in life, is to drink your coffee when you
can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it; while you continue
to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I
sympathize with you, that I am not cheerful enough to write, for, I
believe, coffee once a week is necessary, and you know very well
that coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.

These various references to coffee are thought to have been based upon
an incident in the early days of their friendship, when on the occasion
of the Vanhomrigh fa