MORAL INFLUENCE. 279 



Smith who said, " If you want to improve your under- 

 standing drink coffee; it is the intellectual beverage." 

 Brady terming it " The sovereign drink of pleasure and of 

 health," and Pope eulogizing it in the following lines : — 



" From silver spouts the grateful liquors slide 

 While China's earth receives the smoking tide. 

 At once they gratify their sense and taste, 

 And frequent cups prolong the rich repast ; 



Coffee ! which makes the politician wise 



And see through all things with half-shut eyes." 



Howells paying his tribute to it when he says, " This 

 coffee intoxicates without exciting, soothes you softly 

 out of dull sobriety, making you think and talk of 

 all the pleasant things that ever happened to you." 

 But times have changed since Voltaire, Diderot, Pope 

 and others wrote and sang of coffee, jested, reasoned 

 and made themselves immortal under its influence; 

 alimentary and not literary is the modern cafe, though 

 some can still boast of a clientele artistic, journalistic, or 

 scientific, the commercial element preponderating, but the 

 old historic cafe, the cafe of tradition, where one was 

 sure to find some celebrity on exhibition — a poet or a 

 philosopher — may be said to be defunct. 



From its cordial and gently stimulating effects we 

 may well join in the enthusiastic panegyric pronounced 

 on it by an Arabian of old, of which the following is 

 a free, but condensed, translation : " O, coffee, thou dis- 

 pellest the cares of the great and bringest back those 

 who wander from the paths of knowledge ! Coffee is 

 our gold, and in the place of its illusions we are in 

 the enjoyment of the best and noblest society. Every 

 care vanishes when the cup-bearer presents the delicious 



