en to Swift describe a lady enjoying her evening cups of tea:

"Surrounded with the noisy clans
Of prudes, coquettes and harridans.
Now voices over voices rise,
While each to be the loudest vies;
They contradict, affirm, dispute,
No single tongue one moment mute;
All mad to speak, and none to hearken,
They set the very lapdog barking;
Their chattering makes a louder din
Than fish-wives o'er a cup of gin;
Far less the rabble roar and rail
When drunk with sour election ale."

Even gentle Gay associated soft tea with the temper of women
when he pictures Doris and Melanthe abusing all their bosom
friends, while--

"Through all the room
From flowery tea exhales a fragrant fume."

But not all the women were tea-drinkers in those days. There
was Madam Drake, the proprietress of one of the three private
carriages Manchester could boast. Few men were as courageous
as she in declaring against the tea-table when they were but
invited guests. Madam Drake did not hesitate to make it known
when she paid an afternoon's visit that she expected to be
offered her customary solace--a tankard of ale and a pipe of
tobacco.

Another female opponent of tea was the _Female Spectator_,
which declared the use of the fluid to be not only expensive, but
pernicious; the utter destruction of all economy, the bane of
good housewifery, and the source of all idleness. Tradesmen
especially suffered from the habit. They could not serve their
customers because their apprentices were absent during the
busiest hours of the day drumming up gossips for their mistresses'
tea-tables.

This same censor says that the most temperate find themselves
obliged to drink wine freely after tea, or supplement their Bohea
with rum and brandy, the bottle and glass becoming as necessary
to the tea-table as the slop-basin.

Although Jonas Hanway, the father of the umbrella, was successful
in keeping off water, he was not successful in keeping out tea.
All he did accomplish in his essay on the subject was to call
forth a reply from Dr. Johnson, who, strange to say, instead of
vigorously defending his favorite tipple, rather excuses it as
an amiable weakness; confessing that tea is a barren superfluity,
fit only to amuse the idle, relax the studious, and dilute the
meals of those who cannot take exercise, and will not practis