Its assailants, however, were not very distinguished, but have been quite emphatic in their condemnation. Jonas Hanway, a man whose follies may well be pardoned for his virtues, being, perhaps, the most conspicuous of them. “He looked abroad upon the world, and perceiving that many things went wrong with it, and others no longer presented the same attractive appearance, he remembered them to have had in his youth, he laid to the charge of tea all the evils and disenchantments that oppressed his spirits.” “Men,” he says, “seem to have lost their stature and comeliness and women their beauty, and what Shakespeare had asserted to the concealment of love in this age is more frequently occasioned by the use of tea.” The champions of our “wholesome sage,” who contended that “it was far superior to the boasted Indian shrub,” were but a few of the host who attacked tea as “an innovation pregnant with danger to the health and good morals of the people.” Others, again, although resolute for its banishment from the tea-caddy, were yet willing to accord it a place in the medicine chest. To such complaints echoes were not wanting, the tea-drinkers, in a short time, having it all their own way. Lettson was the first medical writer who attempted to give the public a reasonable and scientific account of tea, but even his fears of its abuse ran away with his judgment. The poet who commends “the cup that cheers, but not inebriates,” must have been startled if Lettson’s pamphlet ever fell into his hands, at the assertion “that the growth of this pernicious custom (drunkenness) is often owing to the weakness and debility of the system brought on by the daily habit of drinking tea,” and that “the trembling hand seeks relief in some cordial in order to refresh and excite again the enfeebled system, whereby such persons fall into the habit of intemperance.” Here assuredly the exception must have been taken for the rule, that tea may be so abused as to create a craving for alcoholic stimulants is unquestionable, but that at any period of its history its abuse has been so general as to become the main cause of intoxication may be safely denied. On the contrary, it was for a long time looked upon as the great means by which intemperance was to have been banished from society. Again, if there be any truth in this charge, why is it that the Chinese and Japanese, who are the greatest and most inveterate tea-consumers in the world for centuries, using it in season and out, are yet the most temperate? It is, however, admitted that the tremblings and other nervous effects produced by tea on brokers and professional testers, liquor is too frequently resorted to as an offset, and that by the practice of some tea drinkers of the absurd and dangerous Russian and English customs of adding vodki, gin or other alcoholic stimulant to the “cup of tea,” a habit is oftentimes acquired which can never afterwards be relinquished. Neither is it true, as