For the full appreciation of afternoon to destroy the nerves, and produce all tea there is no preparation to compare with a picture-gallery. Certain social critics profess to have discovered that many art galleries exist solely in the interests of neighboring tea resorts, and the memory of pictures sometimes found on their walls almost inclines one to accept the theory as a fact. It is a compliment to this divine fluid when the drinker is a little fatigued. But perhaps a cup of tea "the first thing in the morning" is best of all. Then, pre-eminently, as Browning says, is it the time and the place and the loved one altogether. Tea in one's bedroom is a luxury which brings the humble person into line with the monarch and millionaire. It is akin to the luxury of staying away from church. The happiest tea drinkers are they who have generous friends in China. No tea is like theirs. That inscrutable humorist, Li Hung Chang, left presents of priceless tea in his wake as he passed smiling through the West-tea of integrity hitherto unsuspected by the few persons whose glory it was to taste it. Among these was Mr. Gladstone, who is great among tea drinkers, and whose pleasant humor it is to speak of a cup as a dish. Dean Stanley was among the tea giants, and Dr. Johnson's prowess is a by-word. Hartley Coleridge was another colossus of the caddy. One who knew him tells that asking him on a certain occasion how many cups he was in the habit of drinking, the poet replied with scorn, "Cups! I don't count by cups. I count by pots." Once a man looks upon tea when it is green, his fate is sealed. Hyson and "Gunpowder" between them have shattered many a nerve. Green tea numbers amongst its opponents Miss Matty. It will be remembered that when she set up her tea shop in Cranford, the whole country-side seemed to be out of tea at the same moment. "The only alteration," says the chronicler, "I could have desired in Miss Matty's way of doing business was that she should not have so plaintively entreated some of her customers not to buy green tearunning it down as a slow poison. sure manner of evil." According to a story by Sheridan Le Fanu, one of the effects of green tea is to be visited o' nights by an impalpable monkey with red eyes. Punch, with that happy, witty way it has, calls this state "delirium teamens." A cupful of green tea in a bowl of punch is a discreet addition. The commonest tea is black, and it is almost always a blend, even when the terms Congou and Souchong are employed. China, India, and Ceylon-all three-are levied upon for these mixtures. Their description in the catalogues is worth study; indeed, all merchants' adjectives are worth study. A table of ten graduated qualities of black teas lies before me. The lowest priced variety is "pure and useful;" then "strong and liquoring;" then "strong and rich flavored." While the same kind, but two-pence dearer, is "finer grade and very economical;" then "splendid liquor;" then "extra choice and strongly recommended;" then "beautiful quality;" then "soft and rich;" then "small young leaf, magnificent liquor;" and, finally, at three shillings and four-pence, “very choice, small leaf, a connoisseur's tea." In another list I find "very pungent and flavory." "Syrupy" is also a hardworked epithet. It would puzzle a conscientious merchant to fit any of these terms, even the humblest, to some of the tea that one now and then is forced to drink. But the British tourist is attracted not by the tea as tea, but by tea with accessories. The late Mr. Arthur Cecil, the comedian, used to tell with great glee of the cannibal tea at Kew: thus-"Tea, plain, 6d.;" "Tea, with shrimps, 9d.;" "Tea, with children, 18." But tea that has such accompaniments is not to be run after by the epicure. Of all the public varieties the tea obtained at a railway station is perhaps the worst. The liquor served at those carnivals which are known to schoolboys as tea fights or bun struggles, is a close competitor, but being free, or inexpensive, it has an advantage over the station tea, which is costly. A question in an examination paper circulated among the students at a London hospital, asked the reader to "give some idea of the grief felt by the refreshment room tea at never having seen Asia." This sorrow might be shared by the station blend. Its only merit is its heat, but that usually is nullified by the brevity of the time limit allowed by the company for its consumption. Ship's tea, that is to say, tea in the cabin of the ocean tramp, would be worse, only that at sea one is too hungry to care for refinements of flavor. The officers are said to discriminate between tea and coffee by taking the temperature of the milk jug. If hot, the beverage is coffee; if cold, tea. Cold tea has its adherents no less than hot. One of the merits of cold tea is that, as the Bishop of Bedford would say, it "looks like beer." This to the ordinary member of society is a peculiarity which will cause no excitement, but the resemblance is of some value to publicans who do not wish to offend customers by not drinking with them, and yet do not care to be continually sipping alcoholic liquor. A glass of cold tea, on the other side of the counter, is to all intents and purposes a glass of beer. And, indeed, when one is really thirsty on a hot day, there is nothing more delightsome. But care must be taken that the liquor cools apart from the leaves. The most welcome drink that ever came to me was cold tea. We found it in a charcoal burner's hut in the New Forest. The charcoal burner was absent, and we left a sixpence blinking at the bottom of the empty basin. I hope he was satisfied, but if on his return he was half as thirsty as we, he would, rather than have lost his tea, have forfeited the savings of his life. For the time being our need was greater than his. The origin of tea, according to tradition, was as natural as it is credible. Prince Darma, in the remote ages, was a holy Asiatic, who spent day and night in meditations upon the Infinite, and, like the shoeblack in "The Dweller on the Threshold," all the things that begin with a capital letter. One night his ecstasy was interrupted by sleep. On awaking he was so dismayed at his infirmity that he tore off his eyelids, and flung them (says the writer from whom comes my version of the legend) on the ground. The spectacle of a holy Asiatic flinging his eyelids on the ground deserves the notice of an historical painter. On visiting the spot later, Prince Darma found that his eyelids had grown into a shrub. He had the wit to take some of the leaves and pour boiling water upon them. Ever after by simply drinking a little of the precious liquor he was able to keep sleep at bay and pursue his thoughts with added zest and profit. The English history of the plant is comparatively brief. According to the popular statement tea was introduced into his country from Holland in 1666. D'Israeli, however, thinks the date earlier, because he once heard of a collector whose treasures included Oliver Cromwell's teapot. On the other hand, this is not necessarily evidence, for we have all heard of the museum which possessed a small skull certified to be the head of Oliver Cromwell when a boy. Moreover, one Thomas Garway, a tobacconist and coffee dealer in Exchange Alley, sold tea at the rate of three pounds sterling a pound weight about 1660. Not, however, for a score or more of years later was tea at all common, although Charles the Second's Queen Henrietta, who had sipped it with gusto in Portugal, stamped the beverage with her approval in the court. Mr. Waller wrote a poem on the new fashion, in which he praised together the "best of queens” and the "best of herbs." Mr. Waller, by the way, learned from a Jesuit who came from China in 1664 that tea and beaten-up eggs made a worthy substitute for a "competent meal." Concerning the beginnings of tea in this country there is a story told by Southey of the greatgrandmother of a friend of his, who made one of the party that sat down to the first pound of tea that ever came to Penrith. They boiled it in a kettle, and ate the leaves with butter and salt, wondering wherein the attraction lay. Tea, generally, met with the opposi tion which nowadays is reserved for what Mr. Chamberlain lately called it, motor cars and new comic papers. In "a necessary force, a potent influence D'Israeli's account of its introduction, in our public life, but it is also, rightly he says that Patin, a French savant, called the leaf "l'impertinente nouveauté du siècle"-the seventeenthand that Hahnemann (with the upper part of whose body we are so familiar an by reason of its place in the shop windows of homoeopathic chemists) described tea dealers as "immoral members of society, lying in wait for men's purses and lives." Colley Cibber wrote that tea was "the universal pretence of bringing the wicked of both sexes together in a morning." The indictment was indeed persistent and grave. Commenting upon an attack made in tea's early days by Duncan Forbes, Edinburgh reviewer wrote, in 1816 the following summarizing passage: "The progress of this famous plant has been something like the progress of truth; suspected at first, though very palatable to those who had the courage to taste it; resisted as it encroached; abused as its popularity seemed to spread; and establishing its triumph at last, in cheering the whole land from the palace to the cottage, only by the slow and resistless efforts of time and its own virtues." E. V. LUCAS. From The Speaker. POLITICAL ORATORY. There is no more common affectation than to run down the value of political oratory, to sneer with Carlyle at our "National Palaver," or with Ruskin at the vain debates "under the lacquered splendors of Westminster." And yet proverbially inarticulate as we are as a nation, really slow of speech as we are, compared with Irishmen or Frenchmen or with the peoples of Latin blood, there is no nation where the habit of speech has been more closely studied or where the gift of speech confers a greater power. The power of speaking is not only or wrongly, the most influential gift that an Englishman can have. It lifts the man who owns it in deep measure immediately above his fellows, and even places him, as no other quality of experience or genius can, almost at once among the leaders of the State. No literature in the world possesses so many examples of impressive and pathetic speeches made on the scaffold by men about to die, examples, of which Latimer's and Cranmer's, Raleigh's and Strafford's, are only a few of the best known. No country in the world can show such a tradition of Parliamentary speeches, or such great results attaching to them, as the country which learned Parliamentary oratory from Eliot, Wentworth, Pym, and Halifax, which saw it at its richwhich developed it under Shaftesbury est under Bolingbroke and Chatham, at its richest in the age of orators that followed them. and which handed it on in its glory to Canning and Gladstone and Bright. It is true that we have had in England many administrators who were poor speakers, many great men whose fluency was at best laboriously acquired. But no perversity can be greater than to suppose that these men gained anything by being unable to speak. No one who has studied Cromwell's speeches will challenge his right to be labelled "inarticulate;" but that fact only forces on one the reflection how much Cromwell lost by his powerlessness, and how much, on the other hand, Napoleon, for instance, gained by his rare power of speech. Mr. Chamberlain the other day drew a distinction between the eloquence of passion and the eloquence of reason; the one a natural gift, the other an accomplishment to be studied and acquired. This is, perhaps, only another form of the old distinction between the orator and the speaker; but, if so, it is a distinction not altogether happily expressed. Oratory is nothing if it ap peals to passion only. The speaker the windows of the Commons at the who is no orator-Mr. Parnell was a rising sun:case in point-not unfrequently excels in passionate appeal. The real distinction between the successful orator and the successful speaker is, we take it, this. Both must be able to appeal to the emotions as well as to the reason, though, no doubt, the orator uses this power in a greater degree. Both must have command of language and the instinct of debate. But, over and above these things, the orator must have a gift of fancy, a gift of intensity, a gift of style, a gift of uttering now and then a superb commonplace, and beyond all else a gift of feeling the pulse and holding the heart of his audience, which no mere speaker ever can attain. It is, in fact, another example of the difference between genius and talent. The orator must have something of the uncertainty of genius. of its surprises and of its possible failures too. A great speaker, we imagine, hardly ever, a great orator not unfrequently, may fail of his effect. What one peculiarly associates with the highest oratory are those momentary flashes, due to intense feeling and to the power of expressing it in exactly the right words, which made Chatham as an orator so conspicuously great, and which gave to Mirabeau's discourses-discourses often written out laboriously by other hands-the sudden inspiration which carried his audience away. All men who have been great orators have had this power, a power altogether independent of the amount of preparation given to the speech. Wentworth had it when, even in the moment of opposition, he poured out his passionate declaration of loyalty to Charles: "For, besides the supply which we shall readily give him suitable to his occasions, we gift him our hearts-our hearts, Mr. Speaker, a gift that God calls for and fit for a king." The younger Pitt had it, in spite of his "fearful command of rounded periods," when he turned, in his great speech upon the slave trade, and flung a grand quotation through Nos primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis, Bolingbroke and Fox, Sheridan, Can- ond Home Rule Bill-has shown some- ment would be called an orator even by his friends, though both have a singular command of dexterous and even stately speech. Curiously enough, if we want oratory, as Lord Rosebery's charming little speech at Edinburgh reminds us, we must go in these days to the House of Lords. We have no doubt that Mr. Fox's dictum, that a speech that reads well must have been a bad speech, represents the truth, and helps to explain why Burke's magnificent addresses sometimes failed. And yet it is at the same time true that the best speeches are those which have been largely written out, or at least elaborately prepared beforehand. No mistake could be greater than to imagine, as many people do, that the greatest orator is the man who least prepares his speech. All real evidence points to the opposite conclusion, from Chatham to Mirabeau, from Sheridan to Mr. Bright. Burke himself, in his earliest and greatest speeches, before his gorgeous Oriental imagination made his Indian speeches overwrought, before his hatred of the Revolution made his speeches on that subject full of rant, is a fine example of what preparation may achieve. His speeches on Taxation and Conciliation in America both astonished and delighted the Com- episodes as the Free Trade Agitation mons, and no man can read at least and the first Midlothian Campaign. one of their magnificent apostrophes We shall not, perhaps, again see such without feeling its effectiveness to- an age of Parliamentary orators as day. "As long as you have the wisdom the introduction of reporting, together to keep the sovereign authority of this with the system of nomination borcountry as the sanctuary of liberty, oughs for young men of genius, and the sacred temple consecrated to our the absence of platform speaking, procommon faith-wherever the chosen duced a century ago. Public speaking race and sons of England worship free- in the future may come to depend less dom, they will turn their faces toward on grace of culture and more on power you." The grand style has gone, but of lungs. The development of the the spell of oratory is still unbroken. press might possibly tend to obscure Recent years have not, it is true, given its importance, as the pamphlets of us proofs of its rare power so startling Swift and Bolingbroke did in that as Halifax's speech on the Exclusion great pamphleteering age; but that Bill, which won a crown for James II., would require in our press-writers or as Sheridan's speech on the Begums the talents of Bolingbroke and Swift. of Oudh, which produced so profound On the whole, look where we will, an impression that the House, over- we see no sign that the power come by its excitement, unanimously of the orator need as yet resign adjourned. But they have given us its sceptre, whatever other changes results not much less striking in such politics may have in store. Persian Women at Home.-Sacred from the eyes of ordinary visitors, generally built at the back of the house, and possessing a small courtyard of its own, is the Anderun-the apartment devoted by the Persian to his womankind. Here the upper-class women live in their little world, and, narrow though it be, they would not exchange it for any amount of Western liberty. They wish for nothing better. So far from being caged birds pining for freedom, a life of wider scope and activity would be eminently distasteful to them. Love, fine clothes, jewels, and plenty of sweetmeats are the ingredients that form their happiness. In Turkey and India the harem doors are being gradually opened to progressive ideas; but in Persia, the land of retrogression and decay, no corner of the purdah has as yet been lifted. Strictly veiled, and debarred from all intercourse with the opposite sex (excepting near relations), Persian women nevertheless contrive to influence public affairs in no small degree. The most zealous apostle and preacher of the Bab was a woman, and the late shah's mother was a person of much political importance-through her energy and diplomacy he came to the throne. There is, however, plenty of female society, and much time is spent in paying calls, attending funerals and weddings, and the bath; this last is a general meeting-place, where the gossip of the neighborhood is exchanged and characters receive no gentle handling. A man of wealth places the charge of his harem in the hands of eunuchs, who regulate the household expenses, see that undesirable visitors in the shape of dervishes and fortune-tellers are excluded, and do their best to keep in abeyance that spirit of intrigue which is as the breath in her nostrils to every Persian woman. Formerly women convicted of infidelity were horribly punished, and the matter was left in the husband's hands, but cases are now becoming happily rarer. It is the shah's royal prerogative to inspect every man's harem, and a visit from the "Asylum of the Universe" is a great event in the lives of the inmates, for if any one of them finds favor with the monarch she is transterred to his keeping, which is considered promotion in her eyes. Queen. |