In due time Tea became, not simply in China and Japan, but also in India and Persia, the drink of ceremony, just as is coffee with the Turks and Arabs, and wine with ourselves. A little over two centuries since, a French traveller in Persia gravely imagined that what constituted a hospitable custom, was a universal desire to administer medicine. He avers that people “assigned to Tea such extravagant qualities that, imagining it alone able to keep a man in constant health, they treated those who came to visit them with this drink at all hours.” This statement might be paralleled by an Eastern writer who, treating of England, should use the same sentence, merely substituting the word “wine” for “Tea,” and he may add, “to increase the beneficial influence of the beverage, in many instances they make cabalistic movements with the glasses, sometimes clinking the edges together, meanwhile uttering the talismanic words, ‘Your health!’ which are supposed to possess some potent charm.” [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER II. INTRODUCTION OF TEA INTO ENGLAND. Before Tea found its way to England, it had been brought to Holland, thanks to the treaty made by the Dutch with the Japanese. If the Dutchman, as a rule, did not forego his favourite lager and schnapps to take to Tea so readily as did the English, nevertheless, there were not wanting upholders of the new beverage in the land of “dykes, ducks, and Dutchmen,” as somebody construed Voltaire’s famous “_cancana, canards, canaille_.” The first to advocate the wonderful leaf was Cornelius Bontekoe, principal physician to the Elector of Brandenburgh, a Professor in the University of Leyden, and a man of more than ordinary eminence. In a treatise on “Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate,” published in 1679, he strongly pronounces in favour of the first-named drink, and denies the possibility of its being hurtful to health, even if taken in such an inordinate quantity as one or two hundred cups a day, a statement as extravagant as it is impracticable.