XXIV
TEA
Few, I fear, are the readers of Mrs. Sherwood. Yet in "The Fairchild Family" she gave us some pictures of English country life at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century which neither Jane Austen nor Mrs. Gaskell ever beat, and at least one scene of horror which is still unsurpassed. I cannot say as much for "Henry Milner, or the Story of a Little Boy who was not brought up according to the Fashions of this World." No, indeed—very far from it. And Henry now recurs to my mind only because, in narrating his history, Mrs. Sherwood archly introduces a sentence which may serve as a motto for this meditation. Like Bismarck (though unlike him in other respects), she was fond of parading scraps of a rather bald Latinity; and, in this particular instance, she combines simple scholarship with staid humour, making her hero exclaim to a tea-making lady, "Non possum vivere sine Te." The play on Te and Tea will be remarked as very ingenious. Barring the Latinity and the jest, I am at one with Mrs. Sherwood in the sentiment, "My heart leaps up when I behold" a teapot, like Wordsworth's when he beheld a rainbow; and the mere mention of tea in literature stirs in me thoughts which lie too deep for words. Thus I look forward with the keenest interest to