acters introduced in this scene are James Monroe, Count
Tallyrand, General Philip Schuyler, and Thomas Jefferson.

The authors very faithfully reproduce the atmosphere of the coffee house
of Washington's time. As Tallyrand remarks, "Everybody comes to see
everybody at the Exchange Coffee House.... It is club, restaurant,
merchants' exchange, everything."

_The Autocrat of the Coffee Stall_, a play in one act, by Harold Chapin,
was published in New York in 1921.

_Coffee and Literature in General_

An interesting book might be written on the transformation that tea and
coffee have wrought in the tastes of famous literary men. And of the two
stimulants, coffee seems to have furnished greater refreshment and
inspiration to most. However, both beverages have made civilization
their debtor in that they weaned so many fine minds from the heavy wines
and spirits in which they once indulged.

Voltaire and Balzac were the most ardent devotees of coffee among the
French _literati_. Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), the Scottish
philosopher and statesman, was so fond of coffee that he used to assert
that the powers of a man's mind would generally be found to be
proportional to the quantity of that stimulant which he drank. His
brilliant schoolmate and friend, Robert Hall (1764-1831), the Baptist
minister and pulpit orator, preferred tea, of which he sometimes drank a
dozen cups. Cowper; Parson and Parr, the famous Greek scholars; Dr.
Samuel Johnson; and William Hazlitt, the writer and critic, were great
tea drinkers; but Burton, Dean Swift, Addison, Steele, Leigh Hunt, and
many others, celebrated coffee.

Dr. Charles B. Reed, professor in the medical school of Northwestern
University, says that coffee may be considered as a type of substance
that fosters genius. History seems to bear him out. Coffee's essential
qualities are so well defined, says Dr. Reed, that one critic has
claimed the ability to trace throughout the works of Voltaire those
portions that came from coffee's inspiration. Tea and coffee promote a
harmony of the creative faculties that permits the mental concentration
necessary to produce the masterpieces of art and literature.

Voltaire (1694-1778) the king of wits, was also king of coffee drinkers.
Even in his old age he was said to have consumed fifty cups daily. To
the abstemious Balzac (1799-1850) coffee was both food and drink.

In Frederick Lawton's _Balzac_ we read: "Balzac worked hard. His habit