The Little Tea Book | Page 6

Buckle, the author of "The History of Civilization in
England," who was the master of eighteen languages, and had a library of 22,000
volumes, with an income of $75,000 a year, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1850 (he died in
1860, at the age of thirty-nine), tea making and drinking were, or are, what Wendell
Phillips would call lost arts. He thought that, when it came to brewing tea, the Chinese
philosophers were not living in his vicinity. He distinctly wrote that, until he showed her
how, no woman of his acquaintance could make a decent cup of tea. He insisted upon a
warm cup, and even spoon, and saucer. Not that Mr. Buckle ever sipped tea from a saucer.
Of course, he was right in insisting upon those above-mentioned things, for tea-things,
like a tea-party, should be in sympathy with the tea, not antagonistic to it. Still, not
always; for, on one memorable occasion, in the little town of Boston, the greatest
tea-party in history was anything but sympathetic. But let that pass.
Emperor Kien Lung wrote, 200 years or more ago, for the benefit of his children, just
before he left the Flowery Kingdom for a flowerier:
"Set a tea-pot over a slow fire; fill it with cold water; boil it long enough to turn a lobster
red; pour it on the quantity of tea in a porcelain vessel; allow it to remain on the leaves
until the vapor evaporates, then sip it slowly, and all your sorrows will follow the vapor."
He says nothing about milk or sugar. But, to me, tea without sugar is poison, as it is with
milk. I can drink one cup of tea, or coffee, with sugar, but without milk, and feel no ill
effects; but if I put milk in either tea or coffee, I am as sick as a defeated candidate for the
Presidency. That little bit of fact is written as a hint to many who are ill without knowing
why they are, after drinking tea, or coffee, with milk in it. I don't think that milk was ever
intended for coffee or tea. Why should it be? Who was the first to color tea and coffee
with milk? It may have been a mad prince, in the presence of his flatterers and imitators,
to be odd; or just to see if his flatterers would adopt the act.
The Russians sometimes put champagne in their tea; the Germans, beer; the Irish,
whiskey; the New Yorker, ice cream; the English, oysters, or clams, if in season; the true
Bostonian, rose leaves; and the Italian and Spaniard, onions and garlic.
You all know one of the following lines, imperfectly. Scarcely one in one hundred quotes
them correctly. I never have quoted them as written, off-hand--but lines run out of my
head like schoolboys out of school,
"When the lessons and tasks are all ended, And school for the day is dismissed."
Here are the lines:
"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 steamly column, and the cups
That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each, To let us welcome peaceful evening in."
Isn't that a picture? Not one superfluous word in it! Who knows its author, or when it was
written, or can quote the line before or after
"the cups That cheer, but not inebriate"?
&&or in what poem the lines run down the ages? I tell you? Not I. I don't believe in
encouraging laziness. If I tell you, you will let it slip from your memory, like a
panic-stricken eel through the fingers of a panic-stricken schoolboy; but if you hunt it up,
it will be riveted to your memory, like a ballet, and one never forgets when, where, how,
why, and from whom, he receives that.
What a pity that, in Shakespeare's time, there was no tea-table! What a delightful comedy
he could, and would, have written around it, placing the scene in his native Stratford!
What a charming hostess at a tea-table his mother, Mary Arden (loveliest of womanly
names), would have made! Any of the ladies of the delightful "Cranford" wouldn't be a
circumstance to a tea-table scene in a Warwickshire comedy, with lovely Mary Arden
Shakespeare as the protagonist, if the comedy were from the pen of her delightful boy,
Will. Had tea been known in Shakespeare's time, how much more closely he would have
brought his sexes, under one roof, instead of sending the more animal of the two off to
The Boar's Head and The Mermaid, leaving the ladies to their own verbal devices.
Shakespeare, being such a delicate, as well as virile, poet, would have taken to tea as
naturally as