We were troublesome to the passengers ; but to suffer such inconveniences in the stage-coach was common in these days to persons in much higher rank[1]. She bought me a small silver cup and spoon, marked SAM. I. lest if they had been marked S. I. which was her name, they should, upon her death, have been taken from me. She bought me a speckled linen frock, which I knew afterwards by the name of my London frock. The cup was one of the last pieces of plate which dear Tetty sold in our distress[2] . I have now the spoon. She bought at the same time two teaspoons, and till my manhood she had no more.
My father considered tea[3] as very expensive, and discouraged my mother from keeping company with the neighbours, and from paying visits or receiving them. She lived to say, many years after, that, if the time were to pass again, she would not comply with such unsocial injunctions.
I suppose that in this year I was first informed of a future state. I remember, that being in bed with my mother one morning, I was told by her of the two places to which the inhabitants of this world were received after death; one a fine place filled with happiness, called Heaven; the other a sad place, called Hell. That this account much affected my imagination, I do not remember. When I was risen, my mother bade me repeat what she had told me to Thomas Jackson[4]. When I told this afterwards to my mother, she seemed to wonder that she should begin such talk so late as that the first time could be remembered.
- ↑ I was sick; one woman fondled me, the other was disgusted. Note by Johnson.
- ↑ Life, i. 163.
- ↑ In January, 1731, the price of the cheapest tea in London was 10s. per pound, of the dearest 35s. Gentleman's Magazine, 1731, p. 39.
The Quakers of Aberdeen forbade the use of it. ' In 1715 the "fashionable using of tea " was ordered to be "avoided," "tea-tables to be laid aside as formerly advised."' R. Barclay's Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, 1876, p. 498.
'Lord Bristol [writing in 1728] ascribes Lord Hervey's delicate health to the use of "that detestable and poisonous plant tea, which had once brought him to death's door, and, if persisted in, would carry him through it," and he implores him in the most pathetic terms to give it up.' Lord Hervey's Memoirs, vol. i, Preface, p. 27.
- ↑ Their man-servant. Life, i. 38. See post, p. 164.
