The Wreckage of Intentions. David Alff

      In 1679, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet mocking Yarranton and his ideas. A Coffee-House Dialogue; or, A Discourse Between Captain Y——and a Young Barrester of the Middle Temple stages a conversation between Yarranton (“Captain Y,” rewritten into his republican past) and a lawyer skeptical that “so good an Effect might be so easily wrought” from projects.¹⁴⁸ Captain Y badgers the attorney with outlandish claims that resemble but also exaggerate Yarranton’s original proposals: “we may beat the Dutch without fighting, pay Debts without Money, make all the Streets in London Navigable Rivers, harbour all the King’s Great Ships upon the top of an Hill, where they shall be secured from Wind and Weather, and from an hundred other Accidents, they are else obnoxious to.”¹⁴⁹ The fast-talking captain hands the barrister a sheet of paper calling for the establishment of a new club called “the Improvers of England” with a budget for “a pennyworth of Cheese, Bread, Beer and Mustard.”¹⁵⁰

      The barrister sees through Captain Y’s banter, exclaiming, “I say you have out stripp’d all the Poets that ever wrote.”¹⁵¹ Poetry here connotes quixotic imagination detached from material constraint. To “out strip” poetry would be to exceed all bounds of credibility. Captain Y surpasses the impracticality of poets, and shares with them the medium of writing. Coffee-house Dialogue exposes and makes farcical the tactics Yarranton employed to make England’s Improvement an actionable reform instrument. Where Yarranton characterizes himself as a dutiful subject of Charles II, the dialogue reminds readers of his rank in Cromwell’s army. Where Yarranton alleged to speak with plain candor, Captain Y relies on insinuations, “a little push, a wink, a nod, a smile, or Finger held up to the Nose,” suggesting that England’s Improvement mystified its contents to circumvent conflict.¹⁵² Where Yarranton touted the logical continuity between his proposals, the lawyer fails to see how Captain Y’s club proposal “is pertinent to our former Discourse.”¹⁵³ The barrister proceeds to degrade the credentialed engineer and savvy consensus builder into an aged buffoon, who vacantly charges his sharper conversant of being a “young man [who] cannot see so far as I do.”¹⁵⁴