The Wink-Tipping Cordial

BY ROSE MACA.ULAY.

Hewx Far in the dreamy East there grows a plant whose native home is the Sun's Cousin's garden.

TunL.&nrEs: Oh, it is tea !

HAWK: It is.

THE LA.DIES : To think of tea!

THUS Ibsen, in Love's Comedy, as translated by Sir Edmund Gosse ; and thence Miss Repplier's apt title.* Apt, since she does think, and makes us think, of tea, over some five thousand years, for the earliest date assigned to it in the East is B.C. 2737, when Shennung, a Chinese philosopher, was boiling

water for his evening meal and some leaves from his fag- gots, broken from the tea-plant, fell into the pot, de- lighting him with the result. However this may be (and the first written evidence for tea is not till the seventh century A.D., which seems improbably late for anything in China) tea has been a Chinese pleasure for many centuries, called by poets liquid jade, made into cakes with rice, ginger, salt, orange peel and onions, or made and drunk according to the recipe of the great eighth-century tea-poet, Luwuh, who added nothing to the leaves but boiling water and salt.

But most of this agreeable little monograph concerns tea- drinking and tea-drinkers in England, from the seventeenth century down to the present. When was the first cup drunk in England ? Pepys, as we know, "did send for a cup of tea (a China drink) of which I had never drank before" in September, 1660. (But Mrs. Pepys did not get any until seven years later, and then only because she had a cold). The famous Mr. Thomas Garway, of the " Sultaness Head Cophee-House, in Sweeting's Rents by the Royal Exchange," advertised in the Mercurius Politicos for September, 1658, that "the excellent and by all physitians approved China drink, called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay, alias Tee" (this must surely be one of the earliest hints of the e,e pronunciation in England for the letters ea) was to be had of him, either by the pound (at four guineas for the best kind) or drunk at his cophee-house. Two years later, Mr. Garway published his "Exact description of the Growth, Quality and Virtues of the Tea Leaf." "Tea removeth lassitude . . . overcometh superfluous sleep, and prevents sleepinel s in general, so that without trouble whole nights may be spent in study. . . " The price has by this time come down, and is anything from fifteen to fifty shillings a pound.

But Miss Repplier confesses that we do not really know when tea was begun to be drunk in this country. When did the East India Company's men first bring or send it home to their families and friends as a curious deliCate savoury drink, by many of them held thin, bitter iind not too palatable ? Pretty early in the century, one imagines. And what diarist noted, and in which year, that it began to be drunk by the more nice among Oxford undergraduates ? Having this somewhere in my memory, I have, since reading To Think of Tea ! hunted through some half-dozen diaries of the &it half of the century, and more letters. I had thought it Evelyn or one of the Verneys, but cannot find it in either, nor, so far, anywhere else.

However, let us leave dates. Chronology, as the reverend historian Thomas Fuller found, is "a little surly animal, apt to bite the fingers of those that -handle it with greater twill-

liarity than is absolutely necessary." Enough that, from 1660 on, tea and coffee became the rivals of ale and sack with the bibulous British, in spite of the monstrous tax on it. There

.4' To Think of Tea! By Agnes Repplier. (Cape. 5s.) is no- doubt of it, our ancestors were gluttons. It is awe- inspiring to contemplate Dr. Johnson staying at his tea- parties till next morning, swilling down cups by the score, emptying pots by the dozen. It was an expensive luxury having Dr. Johnson to tea. The more he drank, the more he talked, and the more he was loath to leave, and his hostess could not by any means get to her bed until he had done. Taking his twelfth cup from Mrs. Richard Cumberland, he informed her that she had "escaped much better than a certain lady did a while ago," who had invited him to gabble to a parcel of people be knew nothing of. "So I had my revenge of her, for I swallowed five and twenty cups of her tea, and did not treat her to as many words."

The Blue-stockings drank tea, as befitted their sex, with better manners ; Cowper perhaps more regularly, but prob- ably less at a time ; it comforted his sad heart and shut from him the terrors of the everlasting flames that awaited his damned soul, and what better could tea do for anyone ? It did, no doubt, something the same for Johnson, dispersing the "vile melancholy" he had inherited from his father. It has consoled the forlorn, companioned the lonely, awakened the sleepy, livened the lethargic, inspired the stupid, fortified the fearful, illusioned the desperate, liberated the tongue- tied, cheered the sick, soothed the star-crossed, for nearly three centuries in these islands, and in the East for as many thousand years.

Miss Repplier gives engaging glimpses of Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and that gay tea-drinking - clergyman, Sydney Smith, over the tea-cups. "Thank God for tea. I am glad I was not born before tea," Sydney Smith remarked. One wonders if, in sufficient quantities, it would not have done fox Coleridge and De Quincey instead of opium, and if Kubla Khan could not have been caused by, say, twenty-five cups of a sufficiently potent brew. But these authors decided early that opium was necessary to them, and would not be seduced from its fumes. After all, tea is a wakeful drink, and what they desired was to sleep, perchance to dream. Which raises a question on which Miss Repplier does not touch—why does tea, which disperses sleep in most people, induce it in others ? There are those who, when they wake in the night, make themselves tea and sleep again. This is one of the curiosities of biology, which I have never heard explained ; it seam unique in its kind, for one does not hear of those whom alcohol, in sufficient quantities, does not inebriate, whom morphia does not stupify or chloroform entrance, who are not nourished by bread and nauseated by emetics. Why, then, this dual consequence of tea ?

Space forbids to dwell further on this charming book ; it must suffice to add that there are few aspects of tea, financial, political, racial, social, personal or gastronomic, on which it does not touch, with a graceful ease that strolls among scholarly informations like a lady gathering flowers. By the way, talking of ladies, I do not agree that gentlemen make the better tea. Here Miss Repplier shows the all too common tendency to deprive our admittedly inefficient sex of every capacity. Gentlemen make nearly everything better, in- cluding clothes and most things to eat, but ladies (in my experience) tea.

The glory has departed ; there is no doubt of it. Tea has lost caste, by the working of that ineluctable law which dictates that -no food which is not too .costly . fox the masses shall be greatly regarded by the classes.