There are few more agreeable moments in life than tea in an English country house in winter. It is dark at four o’clock. The family and guests come in from the cold air. The curtains are drawn, the open wood fire is blazing, the people sit down around the table and with a delightful meal—for the most attractive food in England is served at afternoon tea—drink of the cheering beverage.
William Cowper, in the eighteenth century, gave an excellent description:
Now stir the fire and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
Not long before this poem was written the traveller Jonas Hanway had the bad luck to publish an essay on tea, “considered as pernicious to health, obstructing industry, and impoverishing the nation,” which naturally drew the artillery fire of the great Dr. Johnson. Sir John Hawkins, in his life of Johnson, comments on this controversy. He says: “That it is pernicious to health is disputed by physicians”—where have I heard something like that recently? But Hawkins continues: “Bishop Burnet, for many years, drank sixteen large cups of it every morning, and never complained that it did him the least injury.”
As for Johnson, “he was a lover of tea to an excess hardly credible; whenever it appeared, he was almost raving, and by his impatience to be served, his incessant calls for those ingredients which make that liquor palatable, and the haste with which he swallowed it down, he seldom failed to make that a fatigue to every one else, which was intended as a general refreshment.”