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obtain a loaf of bread and some common raisins had a meal of luxury ready compounded. Harriet would send him out for penny buns, and with these and a liberal supply of tea they were happy. This was the poet's favourite beverage throughout life.
The liquor doctors rail at, and which I
Will quaff in spite of them; and when we die
We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea,
And cry out, "Heads or tails?" where'er we be.
He was in 1813 on intimate terms with the Newtons, "at whose delightful vegetable dinners even water, if presented, must first have been freed by distillation from its taint of lead; the innocent dainties were such as might have gratified our Mother Eve's angelic guest—all autumn piled upon the table, with dulcet creams and nectarous draughts,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon,
Manna and dates in argosy transferred
From Fez. . . .
"We luxuriated, ran riot," says Hogg, "in tea and coffee, and sought variety occasionally in cocoa and chocolate. Bread and butter and buttered toast were eschewed; but bread and cakes—plain seed cakes—were liberally divided amongst the faithful." Honey, and especially honey-comb, were dear to the poet's lips; he did not think scorn of radishes; and one addition to the vegetable dietary seems to have been all his own—in country rambles he would pick the gummy drops from fir-tree-trunks and eat them with a relish.—(Dowden's "Life," Vol. ii., p. 369.) The story told by Hogg of a meal made by Shelley at an inn on Hounslow Heath when he devoured with gusto successive portions of eggs and bacon shows, if it be accurate, that his abstinence from flesh meat was not without some breaks. The anecdote has a certain parallel in the statement of Shelley's enthusiastic appreciation of Mrs. Southey's teacakes, and is cited by Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson "as an example of Shelley's alternate abstemiousness and self-indulgence in food. Resembling Byron," he continues, "in habitual abstinence and indifference to the quality of the fare that sustained him, Shelley also resembled Byron in occasional acts of feasting that might almost be called excesses of greediness."—("Real
