COFFEE AND CHICORY. 191 
like Turkey, such gouty disorders of digestion and excretion 
are practically unknown. 
Coffee (and Cocoa) favour regular action of the bowels more 
than tea, because not containing so much astringent tannin. 
Coffee Houses formerly held in Great Britain a position somewhat 
similar to that of the Club Houses of the present day. Macaulay 
wrote: “ The Coffee House must not be dismissed with a cursory 
mention.” It might, indeed, in his time have been not im- 
properly called a very important political institution. The 
Coffee Houses were the chief organs through which public 
opinion in the metropolis vented itself. Every man of the upper 
and middle classes went daily to his Coffee House, to learn the 
news, and to discuss it. Every Coffee House had one or more 
orators, to whose eloquence the crowd listened with admiration, 
and who soon became (what the journalists of our own time have 
been often called) a “fourth Estate of the Realm”; this was 
in the early years of the eighteenth century. In Pickwick we 
read amusingly about Coffee-snuff, as taken at that period in 
substitution for the stronger weed. “‘ Do you do anything in 
this way, Sir?” enquired the tall footman (at Bath, of Sam 
Weller), producing a small snuff-box with a fox’s head on the 
top of it. “ Not without sneezing,” said Sam. “ Why, it as 
difficult I confess, Sir,” said the tall footman. “It may be 
done by degrees, Sir; Coffee is the best practice; I carried 
Coffee, Sir, for a long time: it looks very like rappee.” Again, 
in another chapter we read concerning Mr. Jackson, the astute 
clerk of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, as showing his vulgar sagacity 
when questioned by Mr. Pickwick about a subpoena which had 
just been served on that gentleman: ‘‘ Here Mr. Jackson smiled 
upon the company, and, applying his left thumb to the tip of 
his nose, worked a visionary Coffee-mill with his right hand, 
thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime which 
was familiarly denominated ‘ taking a grinder.’ ” 
Trelawney has described the making of Turkish Coffee 
correctly, thus (July, 1900): “ A bright charcoal fire was burning 
inasmallstove. Kamalia first took for four persons four handfuls 
of the small, pale Mocha berries, little bigger than barley ; these 
had been carefully picked, and cleaned; she put them into an 
iron vessel, where, with admirable quickness and dexterity, 
they were roasted until their colour was somewhat darkened, 
but the moisture not exhaled; the over-roasted ones were 
