n;
That wiser 'twere the coming wrath to fly,
And that old women should make haste to die.

Condensed from a poem published in _Fraser's Magazine_,
January, 1857, and ascribed to Hartley Coleridge.

_LADIES, LITERATURE, AND TEA_

In spite of the fact that coffee is just as important a beverage as
tea, tea has been sipped more in literature.

Tea is certainly as much of a social drink as coffee, and more of
a domestic, for the reason that the teacup hours are the family
hours. As these are the hours when the sexes are thrown together,
and as most of the poetry and philosophy of tea-drinking
teem with female virtues, vanities, and whimsicalities, the
inference is that, without women, tea would be nothing, and
without tea, women would be stale, flat, and uninteresting. With
them it is a polite, purring, soft, gentle, kind, sympathetic,
delicious beverage.

In support of this theory, notice what Pope, Gay, Crabbe,
Cowper, Dryden, and others have written on the subject.

"The tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn"

--wrote Tennyson of the early half of the seventeenth century.

What a suggestive couplet, full of the foibles and follies of the
times! A picture a la mode of the period when fair dames made
their red cheeks cute with eccentric patches. Ornamented with
high coiffures, powdered hair, robed in satin petticoats and
square-cut bodices, they blossomed, according to the old
engravings, into most fetching figures. Even the beaux of the
day affected feminine frills in their many-colored, bell-skirted
waistcoats, lace ruffles, patches, and powdered queues.

Dryden must have succumbed to the charms of women through
tea, when he wrote:

"And thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes take counsel, and sometimes tay."

From the great vogue which tea started grew a taste for china;
the more peculiar and striking the design, the more valuable the
tea-set.

Pope in one of his satirical compositions praises the composure
of a woman who is

"Mistress of herself though china fall."

Even that fine old bachelor, philosopher, and humorist, Charles
Lamb, thought that the subject deserved an essay.

In speaking of the ornaments on the tea-cup he says, in "Old
China":

"I like to see my old friends, whom distance cannot diminish,
figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics),