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."[183]

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 Olearius in 1633.  Dr. Short has recorded an anecdote of a stratagem of the Dutch in their second voyage to China, by which they at first obtained their tea without disbursing money; they carried from home great store of dried sage, and bartered it with the Chinese for tea, and received three or four pounds of tea for one of sage:  but at length the Dutch could not export sufficient quantities of sage to supply their demand.  This fact, however, proves how deeply the imagination is concerned with our palate; for the Chinese, affected by the exotic novelty, considered our sage to be more precious than their tea.

The first introduction of tea into Europe is not ascertained; according to the common accounts it came into England from Holland, in 1666, when Lord Arlington and Lord Ossory brought over a small quantity:  the custom of drinking tea became fashionable, and a pound weight sold then for sixty shillings.  This account, however, is by no means satisfactory.  I have heard of Oliver Cromwell’s tea-pot in the possession of a collector, and this will derange the chronology of those writers who are perpetually copying the researches of others, without confirming or correcting them.[184]