We saw the books before coming away. Not the least interesting was Chippendale’s “The Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers’ Director,” issued in London in 1762, with its designs for tea-tables and tea-chests, and the Hepplewhite book of 1787. Dr. Samuel Johnson was rated a prodigious tea-drinker in his day, “beyond all precedent.” We did not compete with his record, nor yet with that of Bishop Burnet, who thought nothing of sixteen cups of a morning, but we did not find our tea taste stinted, that delightful afternoon at Camberwell.
Venus her myrtle, Phœbus has her Bays
Tea both excels, which she vouchsafes to praise.
We found Waller’s lines coming to mind many times afterward, when we had come to discover them in a dusty tome of 1662 which we found for a penny in a book-stall and added it to tea-ana! And what response to the memory of Camberwell adventures was evoked when, home again in our own country, we chanced upon Thomas’s “Massachusetts Spy” and read therein that touching farewell to tea!
Farewell, the teaboard with its equipage
Of cups and saucers, cream bucket and sugar tongs,
The pretty tea-chest also lately stored
With Hyson, Congo and best Double Fine.
We began then with enthusiasm to read up on tea. It behooved us to begin with the “tea-party” episodes our host in Camberwell had hinted at as neglected by our histories. For one thing, there were the autographs to be sought of many of the revolutionary participants. We found a book on the subject, long since out of print, and many a hint was contained therein. This was “Tea Leaves” by Francis S. Drake, “Being a collection of letters and documents relating to the Shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the year 1773, by the East India Tea Company.” There we found many portraits, facsimile signatures, etc. It is a book worth looking for. Our copy cost us but two dollars. On a fly-leaf some one—not the poet himself, alas!—had copied these lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party”:
No! never such a draught was poured
Since Hebe served with nectar
The bright Olympians and their lord
Her over-kind protector;
Since Father Noah squeezed the grape
And took to such behaving,
As would have shamed our grandsire ape,
Before the days of shaving;
No, ne’er was mingled such a draught,
In palace, hall or arbor
As freemen brewed and tyrants quaffed
That night in Boston Harbor!
And how completely the old rancor of it is gone in these days when our hearts beat in unison with the hearts of our British cousins! How different are our tea-parties to-day, American and Britisher, brother and brother!
When we began collecting tea things, we did not get everything we wanted! One of the tantalizing treasures beyond our reach was the poetical effusion of Mr. Nahum Tate, who lived from 1652 to 1715 and celebrated the beginning of the eighteenth century with “Panacea, a poem upon tea, with a discourse on its Sov’rain virtues; and directions in the use of it for health.” A greedy Mæcenas outbid us at the book auction where we thought only ourselves had discovered or could possibly wish to acquire it! With Dr. John Coakley Lettson’s “The Natural History of the Tea-Tree,” printed in London in 1799, we were more fortunate. Likewise Mr. T. Short’s “A Dissertation upon Tea, Explaining Its Nature and Properties, Showing from Philosophical Principles, the Various Effects It Has on Different Constitutions; Also a Discourse on Sage and Water,” produced in 1730, was ours for the expenditure of ten shillings, a rare piece of fortune coming to our door through the good graces of a Birmingham book-seller’s catalogue. I fancy good Queen Anne set the pace to second place for sage and water! We are still on the lookout for the “Treatise on the Inherent Qualities of the Tea-Herb,” by “A Gentleman of Cambridge,” whose scholarly effusion came from a London press in 1750.
In the course of our adventures at home we found that tea-collectors were more numerous than we should have dreamed them to be, perhaps because the subject embraced collecting in almost every field—furniture, old silver, china and pottery, pewter, brasses, books, prints, and what not; to say nothing of collectors of Oriental tea things, as, for instance, the lady who has seven hundred and thirty-two interesting Japanese tea-pots, the equally interesting lady who has a collection consisting of as fine as possible a tea-cup of every sort of porcelain and ware of which tea-cups have been fabricated since the memorable days following the presentation of two pounds of tea to King Charles II by the East India Company. Another collector has gotten together a great number of fine Japanese color-prints, the subjects of which have to do with the tea ceremony, and yet another gentleman “goes in” for the Cha-no-yu (tea ceremony) pottery of Japan. Probably the most interesting collection of tea-caddies in America is that owned by Mr. Frederick H. Howell of New York. Tea-caddies offer to the collector an entertaining hobby, for although they are by no means common, they are still to be “discovered” in many of those nooks that long since have, perhaps, given up other collectable things. I remember once dwelling with enthusiasm on the pleasures of collecting tea things.
“I have a little hobby along that line myself,” remarked one of the group, “teaspoons.”