he 'by continued care and industry in obtaining
the best tea,' now 'sells tea for 16s. to 50s.
a pound.' Garway not only sells tea in the
leaf, but 'many noblemen, physicians, merchants,
&c., daily resort to his house to drink
the drink thereof.' The coffee-houses soon ran
away with the tea-merchant's liquid customers.
They sprang up all over London; they became
a fashion at the Universities. Coffee and tea
came into England as twin-brothers. Like
many other foreigners, they received a full
share of abuse and persecution from the people
and the state. Coffee was denounced as ' hell
broth,' and tea as ' poison.' But the coffee-houses
became fashionable at once; and for a
century were the exclusive resorts of wits
and politicians. 'Here,' says a pamphleteer
of 1673, 'haberdashers of political small wares
meet, and mutually abuse each other and the
public, with bottomless stories and headless
notions.' Clarendon, in 1666, proposed, either
to suppress them, or to employ spies to
note down the conversation. In 1670 the
liquids sold at the coffee-houses were to be
taxed. We can scarcely imagine a state
of society in which the excise officer was
superintending the preparation of a gallon
of tea, and charging his eightpence. The exciseman
and the spy were probably united in
the same person. During this period we may
be quite certain that tea was unknown, as a
general article of diet, in the private houses
even of the wealthiest. But it was not taxation
which then kept it out of use. The
drinkers of tea were ridiculed by the wits, and
frightened by the physicians. More than ail,
a new habit had to be acquired. The praise of
Boyle was nothing against the ancient influences
of ale and claret. It was then a help to
excess instead of a preventive. A writer in 1682
says,—'I know some that celebrate good Thee
for preventing drunkenness, taking it before
they go to the tavern, and use it very much
also after a debauch.' One of the first attractions
of 'the cup which cheers but not inebriates'
was as a minister of evil.

The second epoch of tea was that of excessive
taxation; which lasted from the five
shillings Customs' duty of 1688 to 1745,
more than half a century, in which fiscal
folly and prohibition were almost convertible
terms. Yet tea gradually forced its way into
domestic use. In a Tatler of 1710 we read
'I am credibly informed, by an antiquary
who has searched the registers in which the
bills of fare of the court are recorded, that
instead of tea and bread and butter, which
have prevailed of late years, the maids of
honour in Queen Elizabeth's time were
allowed three rumps of beef for their breakfast.'
Tea for breakfast must have been
expensive in 1710. In the original edition of
the Tatler, we have many advertisements
about tea, one of which we copy:—

From the Tatler of October 10, 1710.

"MR. FARY'S 16s. Bohee Tea, not much inferior
in goodness to the best Foreign Bohee Tea, is sold
by himself only at the Bell in Gracechurch Street
Note,—the best Foreign Bohee is worth 30s. a
pound; so that what is sold at 20s. or 21s. must
either be faulty Tea, or mixed with a proportionate
quantity of damaged Green or Bohee, the
worst of which will remain black after infusion."

'Mr. Fary's 16s. Bohee Tea, not much
inferior in goodness to the best Foreign Bohee
Tea' was, upon the face of it, an indigenous
manufacture. 'The best Foreign Bohee is
worth 30s. a pound.' With such Queen
Anne refreshed herself at Hampton Court:

'Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.'

When the best tea was at 30s. a pound, the
home consumption of tea was about a hundred
and forty thousand pounds per annum. A
quarter of a century later, in the early tea-drinking
days of Dr. Johnson, the consumption
had quadrupled. And yet tea was then
so dear, that Garrick was cross even with his
favourite actress for using it too freely.
'I remember,' says Johnson, 'drinking tea
with him long ago, when Peg Woffington
made it, and he grumbled at her for making
it too strong. He had then begun to feel
money in his purse, and did not know when
he should have enough of it.' In 1745, the
last year of the second tea epoch, the consumption
was only seven hundred and thirty
thousand pounds per annum. Yet even at
this period tea was forcing itself into common
use. Duncan Forbes, in his Correspondence,
which ranges from 1715 to 1748, is bitter
against 'the excessive use of tea; which is
now become so common, that the meanest
families, even of labouring people, particularly
in boroughs, make their morning's meal of it,
and thereby wholly disuse the ale, which
heretofore was their accustomed drink; and
the same drug supplies all the labouring
women with their afternoon's entertainments,
to the exclusion of the twopenny.' The excellent
President of the Court of Session had
his prejudices; and he was frightened at the
notion that tea was driving out beer; and
thus, diminishing the use of malt, was to be
the ruin of agriculture. Some one gave the
Government of the day wiser counsel than
that of prohibitory duties, which he desired.

In 1745, the quantity of tea retained for
home consumption was 730,729 lbs. In 1746,
it amounted to 2,358,589 lbs. The consumption
was trebled. The duty had been reduced, in
1745, from 4s. per lb. to 1s. per lb., and 25 per
cent, on the gross price. For forty years
afterwards, the Legislature contrived to keep
the consumption pretty equal with the increase
of the population, putting on a little
more duty when the demand seemed a little
increasing. These were the palmy days of
Dr. Johnson's tea triumphs—the days in
which he describes himself as 'a hardened
and shameless tea drinker, who has for many
years diluted his meals with only the infusion
of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has