Eminent writers, also, considered it no indignity to extol the precious beverage. What Bacchanalian and hunting songs, cavalier and sea songs, rhapsodical treatises in laudation of hunting, coaching, and so forth, are to the literature of England, such was Tea to the writers, artists, and musicians of China and Japan. In other words their Dickenses, their Goldsmiths, their Nimrods, their Dibdins, their Tom Moores, and their Leeches, instead of having a wide variety of topics to treat of, as was the case with their English compeers, were confined to one subject—Tea. Indeed, each plantation was supposed to possess its peculiar virtues and excellences, like to the slightly varying vineyards of the Rhine, the Rhone, the Garonne, or the Moselle. Each had its poet to sing its praises in running rhymes. In illustration, one Chinese bard, who seemingly was an Anacreon in his way, magnifies the shrub that grows on the Mong-shan mountains, in the territory of Ya-chew, in words which, literally translated, mean:—
“One ounce doth all disorders cure,
With two your troubles will be few’r;
Three to the bones more vigour give;
With four for ever you will live,
As young as on your day of birth,
A true Isyen[A] upon the earth.”
[A] An immortal.
However hyperbolical this testimony may be considered, it at least serves to show the high estimation in which Tea was held. This fact furnishes the best possible answer to the silly objections of certain modern writers who would fain have us believe that the Chinese cultivate Tea, not for their own consumption, but to sell to foreigners. The only gleam of truth latent in so manifestly absurd an assertion being that the Celestials invariably drink the pure Tea, not that which has undergone artificial preparation for those outer barbarians, the English consumers, it being an admitted fact that they prepare Tea “to order,” and can by the aid of mineral facing-powder transform black Tea into green, or green Tea into black at pleasure. Such transformation, however, only alters the appearance to the eye; the quality, inferior or otherwise, remains concealed.
In due time Tea became, not simply in China and Japan, but also in India and Persia, the drink of ceremony, just as is coffee with the Turks and Arabs, and wine with ourselves. A little over two centuries since, a French traveller in Persia gravely imagined that what constituted a hospitable custom, was a universal desire to administer medicine. He avers that people “assigned to Tea such extravagant qualities that, imagining it alone able to keep a man in constant health, they treated those who came to visit them with this drink at all hours.” This statement might be paralleled by an Eastern writer who, treating of England, should use the same sentence, merely substituting the word “wine” for “Tea,” and he may add, “to increase the beneficial influence of the beverage, in many instances they make cabalistic movements with the glasses, sometimes clinking the edges together, meanwhile uttering the talismanic words, ‘Your health!’ which are supposed to possess some potent charm.”
CHAPTER II.
INTRODUCTION OF TEA INTO ENGLAND.
