I may be permitted to add that, after all, religion happily proved stronger than tea, but not without still stronger opposition; and we are told by the disgusted Connoisseur, that “persons of fashion cannot but lament that the Sunday evening tea-drinkings in Ranelagh were laid aside, from a superstitious regard to religion.” A remark which shows how very poor a connoisseur this writer was in matters of propriety. Not, indeed, that diet and divinity could not be seated at the same table. On Easter-day, for instance, the first dish that used to be placed before the jubilant guests was a red-herring on horseback, set in a corn salad. Some hundred and fifty years ago, too, there was a semi-religious, semi-roystering club held at the “Northern Ale-house in St. Paul’s Alley,” every member of which was of the name of Adam. It was formed in honour and remembrance of the first man. The honour was more than Adam deserved; for the first created man not only betrayed his trust, but he shabbily sought to lay the responsibility upon the first woman. And as for “remembrance,” he has managed to survive even the memory of the club founded by his namesakes, and long since defunct. The members were hard drinkers, but not of saffron posset, which Arabella, in “The Committee,” recommends as “a very good drink against the heaviness of the spirits.” The Adamites mostly died, as the legend says Adam himself did, of hereditary gout,—an assertion which would seem to indicate that the author of it was of Hibernian origin!
There are various passages of our poets which tend to show that “tea” and “coffee” became, very early, fixed social observances. Pope, writing, in 1715, of a lady who left town after the coronation of George I., says that she went to the country—
“To part her time ’twixt reading and Bohea,
To muse, and spill her solitary tea;
Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,
Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon.”
At the same period, the more fortunate belles who remained in town made of tea a means for other ends than shortening time. Dr. Young, in his “Satires,” says of Memmia, that—
“Her two red lips affected zephyrs blow,
To cool the Bohea and inflame the beau;
While one white finger and a thumb conspire