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Ettrick Shepherd, visited Keswick, he invited Southey to his inn. The invitation was heartily accepted. Southey stayed half an hour, but showed no disposition to imbibe.
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I was, says Hogg,
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No doubt; but, since Burns and Hogg have passed away, a new generation has arisen. The poet, the essayist, the historian, and the journalist no longer write under the influence of alcohol. As Mr. George R. Sims says, the idea that drink quickly excites the brain is exploded. Healthier stimulants have taken its place. It cannot be denied that some good work has been done under the influence of tea. Look at Dr. Johnson, for instance. That fine old Tory is worthy of the title of the king of the tea-drinkers. He loved tea quite as much as Porson loved gin. Tea was Johnson's only stimulant. He drank it in bed, he drank it with his friends, and he drank it while compiling his dictionary. One of his friends thus describes his mode of life:
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About twelve o'clock I commonly visited him, and frequently found him in bed, or declaiming over his tea, which he drank very plentifully. He generally had a levee of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters. He declaimed all the morning, then went to dinner at a tavern, where he commonly stayed late, and then drank his tea at some friend's house, over which he loitered a great while, but seldom took supper. At his house in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, he frequently drank tea with his dependants, some of whom were blind, and some were deaf. Boswell has left us a graphic picture of these interesting gatherings:--
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We went home to his house to tea. Mrs. Williams made it with sufficient dexterity, notwithstanding her blindness, though he describes her putting her fingers into the cups to feel if they were full; but then it was Johnson's favourite beverage, and he adds,
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I willingly drank cup after cup, as if it had been the Heliconian Spring. There was a pretty large circle there, and the great doctor was in very good humour, lively and ready to talk upon all sorts of subjects. Mr. F. Sherlock, a fertile writer on the temperance question, claims Dr. Johnson as a teetotaler, and has placed him in his gallery of
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Illustrious Abstainers. If the learned doctor was an abstainer from alcoholic drinks, he made up for his abstinence from wine by indulging to excess in the milder and less dangerous stimulant of tea. If he did not write his dictionary by the aid of the Chinese drink, his teapot was never far away from his writing-table.
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I suppose, said Boswell,
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Tea and its Pernicious Consequences, pronouncing it the ruin of the nation, and of every one who drank it. Johnson replied to the attack, and described himself as a
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Johnson's defence did not, however, silence, his critics. Sir John Hawkins characterized tea-drinking as unmanly, and, like John Wesley, almost gave it the colour of a crime. The worthy lexicographer, it must be confessed, was a thirsty soul, for his teapot held at least two quarts. But Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton writes of a clergyman whose tea-drinking indulgences exceeded those of Johnson. This self-denying Christian, who
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Scotia, my auld, respected mither, would have shown out in a different light.