The earliest known teapot is of the year 1670, although Pepys tells of drinking tea in 1660. This fine specimen is a lantern-shaped teapot with a history, and is illustrated page 243. It is inscribed, “This Silver tea Pott was presented to ye Com^{ttee} of ye East India Company by ye Right Hono^{le} George Lord Berkeley of Berkeley Castle. A member of that Honourable and worthy Society and A true Hearty Louer of them. 1670.” It is engraved with the arms of the donor and of the East India Company. The maker’s mark is T. L., and the date letter and hall-marks of London are of the year 1670. In the year 1690 the form of teapot was melon-shaped, still tall, and still suggestive of a coffee-pot, made more manifest by the stopper attached at the spout by a chain. But in the eighteenth century, teapots underwent a change; they began to assume styles which have endured to the present day. Since Queen Anne sat in the Orangery in Kensington Gardens with her bosom friend “Mrs. Freeman” over a dish of tea to hear of Marlborough’s victories, the habit has become established in popular favour. The rivalry between coffee and tea and the attempt of chocolate to obtain supremacy are interesting side-lights in social history, tinctured by political bias and prejudice. Coffee claims the field first. The honour of introducing tea remains between the English and the Dutch, while that of coffee rests between the English and the French. The price of tea in 1660 was sixty shillings per pound, and Thomas Garway, tobacconist and coffee-man, was the first who retailed tea. His shop bill is the most curious and historical account of tea we have: “Tea in England hath been sold in the leaf for six pounds, and sometimes for ten pounds the pound weight, and in respect of its former scarceness and dearness it hath been only used as a regalia in high treatments and entertainments, and presents made thereof to princes and grandees till the year 1657. The said Garway did purchase a quantity thereof, the first publicly sold the said tea in leaf or drink, made according to the directions of the most knowing merchants into those Eastern countries. On the knowledge of the said Garway’s continued care and industry in obtaining the best tea, and making drink thereof, very many noblemen, physicians, merchants, etc., have resort to his house to drink the drink thereof. He sells tea from 16s. to 50s. a pound.” [Illustration: COFFEE-POT. 1737. Newcastle-on-Tyne. (Marks illustrated p. 399.) (_In possession of Messrs. Garrard & Co._) SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TEAPOT. 1670. Presented by Lord George Berkeley to the Honourable East India Company. (_At Victoria and Albert Museum._)] Here is a seventeenth-century advertisement: can Mincing Lane in the twentieth century go better? As to coffee, it is interesting to read the women’s petition to Parliament, in 1674. They complained that coffee