nson_ there appears the
name and address of one Vilain, a merchant, rue des Lombards, who was
evidently in fashion at that period. The translation of the stanza
reproduced is as follows:

COFFEE--A CHANSON

If you, with mind untroubled,
Would flourish, day by day,
Let each day of the seven
Find coffee on your tray.
It will your frame preserve from every malady,
Its virtues drive afar, la! la!
Migrain and dread catarrh--ha! ha!
Dull cold and lethargy.

The most notable contribution to the "music of coffee," if one may be
permitted the expression, is the _Coffee Cantata_ of Johann Sebastian
Bach (1685-1750) the German organist and the most modern composer of the
first half of the eighteenth century. He hymned the religious sentiment
of protestant Germany; and in his _Coffee Cantata_ he tells in music the
protest of the fair sex against the libels of the enemies of the
beverage, who at the time were actively urging in Germany that it should
be forbidden women, because its use made for sterility! Later on, the
government surrounded the manufacture, sale, and use of coffee with many
obnoxious restrictions, as told in chapter VIII.

[Illustration: NAPOLEON AND THE CURE--LITHOGRAPH BY CHARLET]

Bach's _Coffee Cantata_ is No. 211 of the _Secular Cantatas_, and was
published in Leipzig in 1732. In German it is known as _Schweigt stille,
plaudert nicht_ (Be silent, do not talk). It is written for soprano,
tenor, and bass solos and orchestra. Bach used as his text a poem by
Piccander. The cantata is really a sort of one-act operetta--a jocose
production representing the efforts of a stern parent to check his
daughter's propensities in coffee drinking, the new fashioned habit. One
seldom thinks of Bach as a humorist; but the music here is written in a
mock-heroic vein, the recitatives and arias having a merry flavor,
hinting at what the master might have done in light opera.

[Illustration: COFFEE--A CHANSON; MUSIC BY COLET, 1711]

The libretto shows the father Schlendrian, or Slowpoke, trying by
various threats to dissuade his daughter from further indulgence in the
new vice, and, in the end, succeeding by threatening to deprive her of a
husband. But his victory is only temporary. When the mother and the
grandmother indulge in coffee, asks the final trio, who can blame the
daughter?

Bach uses the spelling coffee--not _kaffee_. The cantata was sung as
recently as December 18, 1921, at a concert in New