of the drunkard and the warning of the fool.

* * *

Leave to the Stuart's cavalier the revel's blood-red wine
To hiccup out a tyrant's health and swear his Right Divine
Mine, Cromwell's* cup to stir within, the spirit cool and sure
To face another Star Chamber, a second Marston Moor.
Leave to the genius-scorner, the sot's soul-slaying urns
That stained the fame of Addison, and wrecked the life of Burns
For Etty's hand his private Pot, that for no waiter waits**
For Cowper's lips his "Cup that cheers but not inebriates."

Goal of Infantine Hope, Unknown, mystic Felicity
Sangrael of childish quest much sought, aethereal "Real Tea"
Thy faintest tint of yellow on the milk and water pale
Like Midas' stain on Pactolus, gives joy that cannot fail.

[* Cromwell's teapot was among the first used in England.]

[** Etty, the artist made his own tea in all hotels in a private pot.]

Childhood's "May I have _real_ tea" had grown into the tea-table of
the Junior Debating Club, and Lucian Oldershaw remembers Gilbert as a
young man still lunching at tea shops. I found recently two versions
of a fragment of a story called "The Human Club," written when he was
at the Slade School. The second version opens:

A meal was spread on the table, for the members of the Human Club
were, as their name implies, human, however glorified and
transformed: the meal, however, consisted principally of tea and
coffee, for the Humans were total abstainers, not with the virulent
assertion of a negative formula, but as an enlightened ratification
of a profound social effort (hear, hear), not as the meaningless
idolatry (cheers) of an isolated nostrum (renewed cheers), but as a
chivalrous sacrifice for the triumph of a civic morality (prolonged
cheers and uproar).

The aims of the Human Club were many but among the more practical
and immediate was the entire perfection of everything.

"Perfection is impossible," said the host, Eric Peterson, bowing
his colossal proportions over the coffee-pot. He was in the habit of
showing these abrupt rifts of his train of thought, like gigantic
fragments of a frieze. But he said then quite simply, with no change
in his bleak blue eyes, "perfection is impossible, thank God. The
impossible is the eternal."

We are a long way from tea the "Oriental," cocoa the "vulgar
beast," and wine the true festivity of man that we fi