with which the
beverage itself was regarded, were quite secondary to the
excitement caused by another novelty. When, after heated
disputation, a member desired to test the opinion of the meeting,
any particular point might, by agreement, be put to the vote and
then everything depended upon "our wooden oracle," the first
balloting-box ever seen in England. Formal methods of procedure and
the intensely practical nature of the subjects discussed, combined
to give a real importance to this Amateur Parliament.

[Illustration: A COFFEE HOUSE IN THE TIME OF CHARLES II

From a wood cut of 1674]

The Rota, or Coffee Club, as Pepys called it, was essentially a debating
society for the dissemination of republican opinions. It was preceded
only, in the reign of Henry IV, by the club called La Court de Bone
Compagnie; by Sir Walter Raleigh's Friday Street, or Bread Street, club;
the club at the Mermaid tavern in Bread Street, of which Shakespeare,
Beaumont, Fletcher, Raleigh, Selden, Donne, _et al._, were members; and
"rare" Ben Jonson's Devil tavern club, between Middle Temple Gate and
Temple Bar.

The Rota derived its name from a plan, which it was designed to promote,
for changing a certain number of members of parliament annually by
rotation. It was founded by James Harrington, who had painted it in
fairest colors in his _Oceana_, that ideal commonwealth.

Sir William Petty was one of its members. Around the table, "in a room
every evening as full as it could be crammed," says Aubrey, sat Milton
(?) and Marvell, Cyriac Skinner, Harrington, Nevill, and their friends,
discussing abstract political questions.

The Rota became famous for its literary strictures. Among these was "The
censure of the Rota upon Mr. Milton's book entitled _The ready and easie
way to establish a free commonwealth_" (1660), although it is doubtful
if Milton was ever a visitor to this "bustling coffee club." The Rota
also censured "Mr. Driden's _Conquest of Granada_" (1673).

_Early Coffee-House Manners and Customs_

Among many of the early coffee-house keepers there was great anxiety
that the coffee house, open to high and low, should be conducted under
such restraints as might secure the better class of customers from
annoyance. The following set of regulations in somewhat halting rhyme
was displayed on the walls of several of the coffee houses in the
seventeenth century:

THE RULES AND ORDERS OF THE CO