76 Anecdotes by Richard Cumberland.
from any further trouble, if it had not been for your remark ; but you have reminded me that I want one of the dozen, and I must request Mrs. Cumberland to round up my number " When he saw the readiness and complacency with which my wife obeyed his call, he turned a kind and cheerful look upon her and said 'Madam, I must tell you for your comfort you have escaped much better than a certain lady did awhile ago, upon whose patience I intruded greatly more than I have done on yours ; but the lady asked me for no other purpose but to make a Zany of me, and set me gabbling to a parcel of people I knew nothing of; so, Madam, I had my revenge of her; for I swallowed five and twenty cups of her tea J , and did not treat her with as many words.' I can only say my wife would have made tea for him as long as the New River could have supplied her with water.
It was on such occasions he was to be seen in his happiest moments ; when animated by the cheering attention of friends, whom he liked, he would give full scope to those talents for narration, in which I verily think he was unrivalled both in the brilliancy of his wit, the flow of his humour, and the energy of his language. Anecdotes of times past, scenes of his own life, and characters of humourists, enthusiasts, crack-brained pro jectors and a variety of strange beings, that he had chanced upon, when detailed by him at length, and garnished with those episodical remarks, sometimes comic, sometimes grave, which he would throw in with infinite fertility of fancy, were a treat, which though not always to be purchased by five and twenty cups of tea. I have often had the happiness to enjoy for less than half the number. He was easily led into topics 2 ; it was
1 The number of the cups no doubt were at school in England wrote to
grew in the stories about Johnson, a friend in 1759: * At Whitsuntide
Lord Eldon said that his wife ' had they used to make the housekeeper
herself helped him one evening to [of the school] the present of a guinea
fifteen cups.' Twiss's .Zf/*/072, ed. 1846, for a pound of tea.' Eliza Pinckney,
i. 65. See post, p. 105, n. 4, for by H. H. Ravenel, New York, 1896,
Lady Macleod's helping him to six- p. 181.
teen. Cumberland, at one bold leap, 2 For Johnson's not starting a sub- raises the number to twenty-five, ject of talk see ante, i. 290 ; Life, iii. For the price of tea see ante, i. 135. 307, n. 2 ; iv. 304, n. 4. A South Carolinian lady whose sons
not
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