Mrs. Pepys making her first cup of tea is a subject to be painted. How carefully she metes out the grains of the precious drug, which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, has sold her at a most enormous price—a crown an ounce at the very least. She has tasted the liquor once before: but then there was sugar in the infusion—a beverage only for the highest. If tea should become fashionable, it will cost in housekeeping as much as their claret. However, Pepys says, the price is coming down; and he produces the handbill of Thomas Garway, in Exchange Alley, which the lady peruses with great satisfaction; for the worthy merchant says, that although ‘tea in England hath been sold in the leaf for six pounds, and sometimes for ten pounds the pound weight,’ he ‘by continued care and industry in obtaining the best tea,’ now ‘sells tea for 16_s._ to 50_s._ a pound.’ Garway not only sells tea in the leaf, but ‘many noblemen, physicians, merchants, &c., daily resort to his house to drink the drink thereof.’ The coffee-houses soon ran away with the tea-merchant’s liquid customers. They sprang up all over London; they became a fashion at the Universities. Coffee and tea came into England as twin-brothers. Like many other foreigners, they received a full share of abuse and persecution from the people and the state. Coffee was denounced as ‘hell broth,’ and tea as ‘poison.’ But the coffee-houses became fashionable at once; and for a century were the exclusive resorts of wits and politicians. ‘Here,’ says a pamphleteer of 1673, ‘haberdashers of political small wares meet, and mutually abuse each other and the public, with bottomless stories and headless notions.’ Clarendon, in 1666, proposed, either to suppress them, or to employ spies to note down the conversation. In 1670 the liquids sold at the coffee-houses were to be taxed. We can scarcely imagine a state of society in which the excise officer was superintending the preparation of a gallon of tea, and charging his eightpence. The exciseman and the spy were probably united in the same person. During this period we may be quite certain that tea was unknown, as a general article of diet, in the private houses even of the wealthiest. But it was not taxation which then kept it out of use. The drinkers of tea were ridiculed by the wits, and frightened by the physicians. More than all, a new habit had to be acquired. The praise of Boyle was nothing against the ancient influences of ale and claret. It was then a help to excess instead of a preventive. A writer in 1682 says,—‘I know some that celebrate good Thee for preventing drunkenness, taking it before they go to the tavern, and use it very much also after a debauch.’ One of the first attractions of ‘the cup which cheers but not inebriates’ was as a minister of evil.