houses at the quarter sessions, under a penalty of 51. for 

 every month during which any person should retail coffee, 

 chocolate, or tea, without having first procured such license 

 from the magistrates. From that time to the revolution, 

 coffee-houses multiplied so rapidly that, when Ray published 

 his "History of Plants" in 1688, he estimated that the 

 coffee-houses in London were at that time as numerous as 

 in Cairo itself ; whilst similar places of accommodation were 

 to be met with in all the principal cities and towns in Eng- 

 land. 



There are now in London alone more than 1500 coffee- 

 houses, besides confectioners' shops, and other places where 

 coffee is vended. 



For half a century at least Arabia furnished all the coffee 

 that Europe consumed, which, therefore, must have been 

 very trifling. It was, in fact, long the luxury of a few 

 fashionable people, with whom, however, it must have been 

 in general use sixty years after its introduction, as we find 

 from the well-known passage of the " Rape of the Lock," 

 published in 1712, in which politicians are described as seeing 

 through it " with half-shut eyes." 



Le Grand d'Aussy, in his "Vie Privee des Eran9ais," 

 gives a curious and interesting account of the first introduc- 

 tion of the use of coffee in France. As early as 1658 some 

 merchants of Marseilles introduced the use of coffee into 

 that city, and Thevenot, after his return from his Eastern 

 travels, about the year 1658, regaled his guests with coffee 

 after dinner. 



"This, however," says Le Grand, "was but the eccen- 

 tricity of a traveller, which would not come into fashion 

 among such a people as the Parisians. To bring coffee into 

 credit, some extraordinary and striking circumstance was 

 necessary. This circumstance occurred on the arrival, in 

 1669, of an embassy from the Grand Seigneur Mahomet IV. 



