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