Tea was Johnson’s only stimulant, he loved it as much as Porson loved gin, drinking it all times and under all circumstances, in bed and out, with his friends and alone, more particularly while compiling his famous dictionary. Boswell drank cup after cup, as if it had been the “Heliconian spring.” While Hazlitt, like Johnson, was a prodigious tea-drinker, Shelley’s favorite beverage was water, but at the same time tea was always grateful to him. Bulwer’s breakfast was generally composed of dry toast and cold tea, and De Quincy states that he invariably drank tea from eight o’clock at night until four in the morning, when engaged in his literary labors, and knew whereof he spoke when he named tea “the beverage of the intellectual.” Kent usually had a cup of tea and a pipe of tobacco, on which he worked eight hours at a stretch, and Motley, the historian tells us that he “usually rose at seven, and with the aid of a cup of tea only, wrote until eleven.” And Victor Hugo, as a general rule, used tea freely, but fortifying it with a little brandy. Turning from literature to politics, we find that Palmerston resorted to tea during the midnight sessions of Parliament. Cobden declaring “the more work he had to do the more tea he drank,” and Gladstone himself confesses to drinking large quantities of tea between midnight and morning during the prolonged parliamentary sittings, while Clemenceau, the leader of the French Radicals, admits himself to be “an intemperate tea-drinker” during the firey discussions of debate.