\Cof"fee*house`\, n.
A house of entertainment, where guests are supplied with
coffee and other refreshments, and where men meet for
conversation.

      The coffeehouse must not be dismissed with a cursory
      mention. It might indeed, at that time, have been not
      improperly called a most important political
      institution. . . . The coffeehouses were the chief
      organs through which the public opinion of the
      metropolis vented itself. . . . Every man of the upper
      or middle class went daily to his coffeehouse to learn
      the news and discuss it. Every coffeehouse had one or
      more orators, to whose eloquence the crowd listened
      with admiration, and who soon became what the
      journalists of our own time have been called -- a
      fourth estate of the realm.              --Macaulay.