688 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
the Tea—’ ‘The twinkling of what?’ said the King. ‘It 
began with the Tea,’ the Hatter replied. ‘ Of course twinkling 
begins with a T,” said the King sharply ; ‘do you take me for 
a dunce?’ ‘Go on!’” 
Chocolate was the usual breakfast beverage in the early part 
of the eighteenth century ; thus The Tatler tells that “ the fops 
had their Chocolate in their dressing-gowns, served in their 
bedrooms, and green Tea two hours later.” However, the 
simple family of John Wesley drank small beer at each meal. 
Swift, who suffered from deafness, and frequent severe vertigo 
connected therewith, writes that his physician forbade Bohea, 
allowing him to drink only green Tea, and coffee. About the 
middle of the same century Tea had become common among all 
classes. Hanway relates that “even beggars might be seen 
drinking their Tea. Country girls, when they sought situations 
in London, bargained that they must have Tea twice a day.” 
Those persons who have read Boswell’s Lije of Dr. Johnson will 
remember what, to use his own words, “a hardened, and shame- 
less Tea-drinker he was; rarely did he let his kettle get cool. 
‘Tea,’ said he, ‘ amuses me in the evening, solaces my midnight, 
and welcomes me in the morning.’ ” Lady McLeod, a fashionable 
dame of the period, wrote in her Diary that “ the learned Doctor 
frequently quaffed sixteen cups when he was spending the evening 
with her; and Mrs. Piozzi records it that she has sat up until 
four in the morning listening to the Doctor’s clever, but stilted 
talk, and filling his cups for him. She once suggested his using a 
bowl instead of an ordinary cup, whereupon he desired to know 
what was her reason for doing this. ‘Oh! to save yourself 
trouble, Doctor,’ she replied, ‘not me!’ The Doctor remem- 
bered in his early days drinking Tea with Garrick, when Peg 
Woffington made it, and (so Garrick grumbled) made it ‘ as red 
as blood.’” “Tea,” wrote De Quincey (1821), “though it is 
ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous 
sensibilities, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not 
susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, yet it will 
always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual; and for 
my part I would have joined Dr. Johnson in a bellum internecinum 
against Jonas Hanway, or any other impious person who should 
have presumed to dispa ige it.” “Surely everyone is aware 
_ Of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside ; candles 
_ at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, Tea, a fair Tea-maker, shutters — 
