s seems to have happened.
Patin, who wrote so furiously against the introduction of antimony,
spread the same alarm at the use of tea, which he calls "l'impertinente
nouveaute du siecle." In Germany, Hanneman considered tea-dealers as
immoral members of society, lying in wait for men's purses and lives;
and Dr. Duncan, in his Treatise on Hot Liquors, suspected that the
virtues attributed to tea were merely to encourage the importation.[182]

Many virulent pamphlets were published against the use of this shrub,
from various motives. In 1670, a Dutch writer says it was ridiculed in
Holland under the name of hay-water. "The progress of this famous
plant," says an ingenious writer, "has been something like the progress
of truth; suspected at first, though very palatable to those who had
courage to taste it; resisted as it encroached; abused as its popularity
seemed to spread; and establishing its triumph at last, in cheering the
whole land from the palace to the cottage, only by the slow and
resistless efforts of time and its own virtues."[183]

The history of the Tea-shrub, by Dr. Lettsom, usually referred to on
this subject, I consider little more than a plagiarism on Dr. Short's
learned and curious dissertation on Tea, 1730, 4to. Lettsom has
superadded the solemn trifling of his moral and medical advice.

These now common beverages are all of recent origin in Europe; neither
the ancients nor those of the middle ages tasted of this luxury. The
first accounts we find of the use of this shrub are the casual notices
of travellers, who seem to have tasted it, and sometimes not to have
liked it: a Russian ambassador, in 1639, who resided at the court of the
Mogul, declined accepting a large present of tea for the Czar, "as it
would only encumber him with a commodity for which he had no use." The
appearance of "a black water" and an acrid taste seems not to have
recommended it to the German Olearius in 1633. Dr. Short has recorded
an anecdote of a stratagem of the Dutch in their second voyage to China,
by which they at first obtained their tea without disbursing money; they
carried from home great store of dried sage, and bartered it with the
Chinese for tea, and received three or four pounds of tea for one of
sage: but at length the Dutch could not export sufficient quantities of
sage to supply their demand. This fact, however, proves how deeply the
imagination is concerned with our palate; for the Chinese, affected by
the e