drinking here of chocolate
Can make a fool a sophie."

In the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, tea, coffee, and chocolate were
unknown save to travellers and savants, and the handmaidens of the good
queen drank beer with their breakfast. When Shakespeare and Ben Jonson
forgathered at the Mermaid Tavern, their winged words passed over
tankards of ale, but later other drinks became the usual accompaniment
of news, story, and discussion. In the sixteen-sixties there were no
strident newspapers to destroy one's equanimity, and the gossip of the
day began to be circulated and discussed over cups of tea, coffee, or
chocolate. The humorists, ever stirred by novelty, tilted, pen in hand,
at these new drinks: thus one rhymster described coffee as

"Syrrop of soot or essence of old shoes."

The first coffee-house in London was started in St. Michael's Alley,
Cornhill, in 1652 (when coffee was seven shillings a pound); the first
tea-house was opened in Exchange Alley in 1657 (when tea was five
sovereigns a pound), and in the same year (with chocolate about ten to
fifteen shillings per pound) a Frenchman opened the first
chocolate-house in Queen's Head Alley, Bishopsgate Street. The rising
popularity of chocolate led to the starting of more of these chocolate
houses, at which one could sit and sip chocolate, or purchase the
commodity for preparation at home. Pepys' entry in his diary for 24th
November, 1664, contains: "To a coffee house to drink jocolatte, very
good." It is an artless entry, and yet one can almost hear him smacking
his lips. Silbermann says that "After the Restoration there were shops
in London for the sale of chocolate at ten shillings or fifteen
shillings per pound. Ozinda's chocolate house was full of aristocratic
consumers. Comedies, satirical essays, memoirs and private letters of
that age frequently mention it. The habit of using chocolate was deemed
a token of elegant and fashionable taste, and while the charms of this
beverage in the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. were so highly
esteemed by courtiers, by lords and ladies and fine gentlemen in the
polite world, the learned physicians extolled its medicinal virtues."
From the coffee house and its more aristocratic relative the chocolate
house, there developed a new feature in English social life--the Club.
As the years passed the Chocolate House remained a rendezvous, but the
character of its habitues changed from time to time. Thus one, famou