is dry!" On this Johnson is content to inform us, that men that begged under pretence of lunacy used formerly to carry a horn and blow it through the streets." This is no explanation of Edgar's allusion to the dryness of his horn. Steevens adds a fanciful note, that Edgar alludes to a proverbial expression, Thy horn is dry, designed to express that a man had said all he could say; and, further, Steevens supposes that Edgar speaks these words aside; as if he had been quite weary of Tom o' Bedlam's part, and could not keep it up any longer. The reasons of all this conjectural criticism are a curious illustration of perverse ingenuity. Aubrey's manuscript note has shown us that the Bedlam's horn was also a drinking-horn, and Edgar closes his speech in the perfection of the assumed character, and not as one who had grown weary of it, by making the mendicant lunatic desirous of departing from a heath, to march, as he cries, "to wakes, and fairs, and market-towns-Poor Tom! thy horn is dry!" as more likely places to solicit alms; and he is thinking of his drink-money, when he cries that "his horn is dry."

An itinerant lunatic, chanting wild ditties, fancifully attired, gay with the simplicity of childhood, yet often moaning with the sorrows of a troubled man, a mixture of character at once grotesque and plaintive, became an interesting object to poetical minds. It is probable that the character of Edgar, in the Lear of Shakspeare, first introduced the hazardous conception into the poetical world. Poems composed in the character of a Tom o' Bedlam appear to have formed a fashionable class of poetry among the wits; they seem to have held together their poetical contests, and some of these writers became celebrated for their successful efforts, for old Izaak Walton mentions a "Mr. William Basse, as one who has made the choice songs of 'The Hunter in his career,' and of 'Tom o' Bedlam,' and many others of note." Bishop Percy, in his "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," has preserved six of what he calls "Mad Songs," expressing his surprise that the English should have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours," for such are not found in the collection of songs of the French, Italian, &c., and nearly insinuates, for their cause, that we are perhaps more liable to the calamity of madness than other nations. This superfluous criticism had been spared had that elegant collector been aware of the circum

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stance which had produced this class of poems, and recollected the more ancient original in the Edgar of Shakspeare. Some of the "Mad Songs" which the bishop has preserved are of too modern a date to suit the title of his work; being written by Tom D'Urfey, for his comedies of Don Quixote. I shall preserve one of more ancient date, fraught with all the wild spirit of this peculiar character.*

This poem must not be read without a continued reference to the personated character. Delirious and fantastic, strokes of sublime imagination are mixed with familiar comic humour, and even degraded by the cant language; for the gipsy habits of life of these "Tom o' Bedlams" had confounded them with "the progging Abram men." These luckless beings are described by Decker as sometimes exceeding merry, and could do nothing but sing songs fashioned out of their own brains; now they danced, now they would do nothing but laugh and weep, or were dogged and sullen both in look and speech. All they did, all they sung, was alike unconnected; indicative of the desultory and rambling wits of the chanter.

A TOM-A-BEDLAM SONG.

From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
All the spirits that stand
By the naked man,

In the book of moons defend ye!
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken;

Nor travel from

Yourselves with Tom
Abroad, to beg your bacon.

CHORUS.

Nor never sing any food and feeding,

Money, drink, or clothing;

Come dame or maid,

Be not afraid,

For Tom will injure nothing.

* I discovered the present in a very scarce collection, entitled "Wit and Drollery," 1661; an edition, however, which is not the earliest of this once fashionable miscellany.

+ Harman, in his curious "Caveat, a warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabones," 1566, describes the "Abraham Man" as a pretended lunatic, who wandered the country over, soliciting food or charity at farm-houses, or frightening and bullying the peasantry for the same. They described themselves as cruelly treated in Bedlam, and nearly in the words of Shakspeare's Edgar.

With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,

And a horse of air,

To the wilderness I wander;

With a knight of ghosts and shadows,

I summoned am to Tourney:

Ten leagues beyond

The wide world's end;

Methinks it is no journey!

The last stanza of this Bedlam song contains the seeds of exquisite romance; a stanza worth many an admired poem.

INTRODUCTION OF TEA, COFFEE, AND CHOCOLATE.

It is said that the frozen Norwegians, on the first sight of roses, dared not touch what they conceived were trees budding with fire: and the natives of Virginia, the first time they seized on a quantity of gunpowder, which belonged to the English colony, sowed it for grain, expecting to reap a plentiful crop of combustion by the next harvest, to blow away the whole colony.

In our own recollection, strange imaginations impeded the first period of vaccination; when some families, terrified by the warning of a physician, conceived their race would end in a species of Minotaurs

Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem.

We smile at the simplicity of the men of nature, for their mistaken notions at the first introduction among them of exotic novelties; and yet, even in civilised Europe, how long a time those whose profession or whose reputation regulates public opinion are influenced by vulgar prejudices, often disguised under the imposing form of science! and when their Iudicrous absurdities and obstinate prejudices enter into the matters of history, it is then we discover that they were only imposing on themselves and on others.

It is hardly credible that on the first introduction of the Chinese leaf, which now affords our daily refreshment; or the American leaf, whose sedative fumes made it so long an universal favourite; or the Arabian berry, whose aroma exhilarates its European votaries; that the use of these harmless novelties should have spread consternation among the nations

of Europe, and have been anathematised by the terrors and the fictions of some of the learned. Yet this seems to have happened. Patin, who wrote so furiously against the introduction of antimony, spread the same alarm at the use of tea, which he calls "l'impertinente nouveauté du siècle." In Germany, Hanneman considered tea-dealers as immoral members of society, lying in wait for men's purses and lives; and Dr. Duncan, in his Treatise on Hot Liquors, suspected that the virtues attributed to tea were merely to encourage the importation.*

Many virulent pamphlets were published against the use of this shrub, from various motives. In 1670, a Dutch writer says it was ridiculed in Holland under the name of hay-water. "The progress of this famous plant," says an ingenious writer, "has been something like the progress of truth; suspected at first, though very palatable to those who had 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."+

The history of the Tea-shrub, by Dr. Lettsom, usually referred to on this subject, I consider little more than a plagiarism on Dr. Short's learned and curious dissertation on Tea, 1730, 4to. Lettsom has superadded the solemn trifling of his moral and medical advice.

These now common beverages are all of recent origin in Europe; neither the ancients nor those of the middle ages tasted of this luxury. The first accounts we find of the use of this shrub are the casual notices of travellers, who seem to have tasted it, and sometimes not to have liked it: a Russian ambassador, in 1639, who resided at the court of the Mogul, declined accepting a large present of tea for the Czar, " as it would only encumber him with a commodity for which he had no use." The appearance of "a black water" and an

acrid taste seems not to have recommended it to the German

* Dr. James, the translator of "Pauli's Treatise on Tea," 1746, says: "According to the Chinese, tea produces an appetite after hunger and thirst are satisfied; therefore, the drinking of it is to be abstained from." He concludes his treatise by saying: "As Hippocrates spared no pains to remove and root out the Athenian plague, so have I used the utmost of my endeavours to destroy the raging epidemical madness of importing tea into Europe from China."

Edinburgh Review, 1816, p. 117.