Johnson was a man of kind heart and great common sense but he never allowed these to get in the way of his outspoken prejudices. He affected to hate America and Americans and Scots almost as much. “Let me tell you,” the Scottish Boswell dutifully records his saying, “the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.” Johnson loved strong drink like port and brandy and hated wine, saying, “Any man excepting Boswell could be drowned in it before it made him drunk.” He took a glass once only, to toast Sir Joshua when the great painter was knighted. But he could nowise afford alcohol, being of necessity a worker–a reluctant but for many years an incredibly hard worker who knew alcohol to be work’s deadly enemy. Before his monumental Dictionary finally appeared in 1755, a visitor to his quarters found “five or six Greek folios, a deal writing desk and a chair and a half,” plus two small spoons he’d inherited from his mother, a huge and handsome Chinese teapot, and a retinue of cups and saucers. Johnson politely seated his guest in the whole chair and balanced his own huge frame on its three-legged companion, tenderly steadying it, like a wounded friend, against the wall. And thus the two men passed the night in talk and tea drinking.

Dr. Johnson’s life, like Boswell’s book, is punctuated with tea. A certain lady who once poured him sixteen cups in swift succession urbanely asked if a small basin “would save him trouble.” With more truth than politeness, Johnson answered “Madam, all the ladies put such questions to me. It is to save themselves the trouble, not me.” Soon after his Dictionary had made the great tea drinker famous — and more comfortably off — a puritan mined writer published an attack on tea, lamenting that sixteen ships and five hundred seamen were employed each year (circa 1750) in bringing it to England. Even beggars cadged an occasional cup, he complained, servants clamored for it, and he knew but a single lady right-minded enough to confine this luxury to her immediate family! In words that resounded throughout the kingdom, Johnson rose to the defense, avowing himself “a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.” Boswell gravely records the whole affair, concluding with masterful understatement, “I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than did Johnson.” That is still a safe supposition.