Dryden must have succumbed to the charms of women through tea, when he wrote:
"And thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes take counsel, and sometimes tay."
From the great vogue which tea started grew a taste for china; the more peculiar and striking the design, the more valuable the tea-set.
Pope in one of his satirical compositions praises the composure of a woman who is
"Mistress of herself though china fall."
Even that fine old bachelor, philosopher, and humorist, Charles Lamb, thought that the subject deserved an essay.
In speaking of the ornaments on the tea-cup he says, in "Old China":
"I like to see my old friends, whom distance cannot diminish, figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still, for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, has made to spring up beneath their sandals. I love the men with women's faces and the women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions.
"Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver--two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same lady, or another--for likeness is identity on tea-cups--is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty, mincing foot, which is in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) that must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead--a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream!"
The Spectator and the Tatter were also susceptible to the female influence that tea inspired. In both of these journals there are frequent allusions to tea-parties and china. At these gatherings, poets and dilletante literary gentlemen read their verses and essays to the ladies, who criticised their merits. These "literary teas" became so contagious that a burning desire for authorship took possession of the ladies, for among those who made their debut as authors about this time were Fanny Burney, Mrs. Alphra Behn, Mrs. Manley, the Countess of Winchelsea, and a host of others.