Year

1834

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (2)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1812-1848	Hunt, Leigh. Works. Hunt, Leigh. A day by the fire. In : The Reflector (1812). With tea or coffee. … The eulogies pronounced on his favourite beverage by Dr. Johnson are too well known to be repeated here, and the commendatory description of the Emperor Kien Long, to an European taste at least, is somewhat too dul, unless his Majesty's teapot has been shamefully translated… Besides, I never see it but I reminds me of the Turks, and their Arabian tales, an association infinitely preferable to any Chinese ideas ; and, like the king who put his head into the tub, I am transported to distant lands the moment I dip into the coffee-cup… "For lo ! the board with cups and spoons are crowned, The berries crackle, and the mill turns round ; On shining altars of Japan they raise The silver lamp ; the fiery spirits blaze ; From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide ; And China's earth receives the smoking tide… Hunt, Leigh. The old lady. In : The round table (1817). … In the sitting-room is rather a spare assortment of shining old mahogany furniture, or carved armchairs equally old, with chintz drperies down to the ground ; a folding or other screen, with Chinese figures, their round, little-eyed, meek fraces perking sideways… Hunt, Leigh. Far countries. In : The Indicator ; Dec. 8 (1819). … At the time when the French had this fit upon them of praising the English (which was nevertheless the honester one of the two), they took to praising the Chinese for numberless unknown qualities. This seems a contradiction to the near-sightedness we speak of : but the reason they praised them was, that the Chinese had the merit of unbounded religious toleration ; a great and extraordinary one, certainly, and not the less so for having been, to all appearance, the work of one man. All the romance of China, such as it was – anything in which they differed from the French – their dress, their porcelain towers, their Great Wall – was nothing. It was the particular agreement with the philosophers. It happened, curiously enough, that they could not have selected for their panegyric a nation apparently more contemptuous of others ; or at least more self-satisfied and unimaginative. The Chinese are cunning and ingenious, and have a great talent at bowing out ambassadors who come to visit them. But it is somewhat inconsistent with what appears to be their general character that they should pay strangers even this equivocal compliment ; for, under a prodigious mask of politeness, they are not slow to evince their contempt of other nations whenever any comparison is insinuated with the subjects of the Brother of the Sun and Moon. The knowledge they respect in us most is that of gun-making, and of the East Indian passage. When our countrymen showed them a map of the earth, they inquired for China ; and, on finding that it only made a little piece in a corner, could not contain their derision. They thought that it was the main territory in the middle – the apple of the world's eye. Hunt, Leigh. Hats, new and ancient. In : The Indicator ; March 8 (1820). … The Chinese, who carry their records farther back than any other people, are a hatted race, both narrow-brimmel and broad… Hunt, Leigh. Seamen on shore. In : The Indicator ; March 15 (1820). … He will tell you how the Chinese drink and the NEGURS dance, and the monkeys pelt you with cocoa-nuts ; and how King Domy would have built him a mud hut and made him a peer of the realm, if he would have stopped with him and taught him to make trousers… Hunt, Leigh. An earth upon heaven. In : The Companion ; April 2 (1828). … We cannot well fancy a celestial ancient Briton delighting himself with painting his skin, or a Chinese angel hobbling a mile up the Milky Way in order to show herself to advantage. For breakfast we must have a tea beyond anything Chinese… Hunt, Leigh. The world of books. In : Hunt, Leigh. Men, women, and books. (London : Smith, Elder and Co., 1847). …China, is a very unknown place to us, - in one sense oft he word unknown ; but who is not intimate with it as the land of tea, and china, and ko-tous, and pagodas, and mandarins, and Confucius, and conical caps, and people with little names, little eyes, and little feet, who sit in little bowers, drinking litte cups of tea, and writing little odes ? The Jesuits, and the teacups, and the novel of Iu-Kiao-Li, have made us well acquainted with it ; better, a great deal, than millions of its inhabitants are acquainted – fellows who think it in the middle of the world, and know nothing of themselves. With one China they are totally unacquainted, to wit, the great China of the poet and old travellers, Cathy, "seat of Cathian Can ", the country of which Ariosto's "Angelica" was princess-royal ; yes, she was a Chinese, "the fairest of her sex, Angelica"… Hunt, Leigh. The town : its memorable characters and events : St. Paul's to St. James's. (London : Smith, Elder, and Co., 1848). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42060/42060-h/42060-h.htm. … In this court are the premises of the eminent tea-dealers, Messrs. Twining, the front of which, surmounted with its stone figures of Chinese, has an elegant appearance in the Strand… Kneller, besides being an admired painter (and it is supposed from one of his performances, the portrait of a Chinese, that he could have been admired by posterity, if he chose), was a man of wit; but so vain, that he is described as being the butt of all the wits of his acquaintances…	Person: Hunt, Leigh
2	1834	Hunt, Leigh. Tea-drinking [ID D31310]. The very word tea. so petty, so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of something inexpressibly minute and satisfied with a little {tee !), resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mistaken one) of that extraordinary people, of whom Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors, have a language consisting only of a few hundred words, gave us China-ware and the strange pictures on our tea-cups, made a certain progress in civilisation long before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no further, and, if numbers and the customs of "venerable ancestors" are to carry the day, are at once the most populous and the most respectable nation on the face of the earth. As a population they certainly are a most enormous and wonderful body ; but, as individuals, their ceremonies, their triflingedicts, their jealousy of foreigners, and their tea-cup representations of themselves (which are the only ones popularly known), impress us irresistibly with a fancy that they are a people all toddling, little-eyed, little-footed, little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overweening, pig-tailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and temples with bells at every corner and story, and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over "nine-inch bridges," with little mysteries of bell-hung whips in their hands, — a boat, or a house, or a tree, made of a pattern, being over their heads or underneath them (as the case may happen), and a bird as large as the boat, always having a circular white space to fly in. Such are the Chinese of the tea-cups and the grocers' windows, and partly of their own novels too, in which everything seems as little as their eyes, little odes, little wine-parties, and a series of little satisfactions. However, it must be owned, that from these novels one gradually acquires a notion that there is a great deal more good sense and even good poetry among them than one had fancied from the accounts of embassies and the autobiographical paintings on the China-ware ; and this is the most probable supposition. An ancient and great nation, as civilised as they, is not likely to be so much behind-hand with us in the art of living as our self-complacency leads us to imagine. If their contempt of us amounts to the barbarous, perhaps there is a greater share of barbarism than we suspect in our scorn of them. At all events, it becomes us to be grateful for their tea. What a curious thing it was, that all of a sudden the remotest nation of the East, otherwise unknown, and foreign to all our habits, should convey to us a domestic custom which changed the face of our morning refreshments ; and that, instead of ale and meat, or wine, all the polite part of England should be drinking a Chinese infusion, and setting up earthenware in their houses, painted with preposterous scenery !... But to the right tea-drinker, the cup, we see, contains not only recollections of eminent brethren of the bohea, but the whole Chinese nation, with all its history, Lord Macartney included ; nay, for that matter, Ariosto and his beautiful story of Angelica and Medoro ; for Angelica was a Chinese ; and then collaterally come in the Chinese neighbours and conquerors from Tartary, with Chaucer's and the travels of Marco Polo and others, and the Jesuit missionaries, and the Japanese with our friend Golownin, and the Loo Choo people, and Confucius, whom Voltaire (to show his learning) delights to call by his proper native appellation of Kong-foo-tsee (reminding us of Congo tea) ; and then we have the Chinese Tales, and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, and Goldsmith brings you back to Johnson again and the tea-drinkings of old times ; and then we have the Rape of the Lock before us, with Belinda at breakfast, and Lady Wortley Montague's tea-table eclogue, and the domestic pictures in the Taller and Spectator with the passions existing in those times for china-ware, and Horace Walpole, who was an old woman in that respect ; and, in short, a thousand other memories, grave and gay, poetical and prosaical, all ready to wait upon anybody who chooses to read books, like spirits at the command of the book-readers of old, who, for the advan- tages they had over the rest of the world, got the title of Magicians. ..	Person: Hunt, Leigh