Stanhope, took me one afternoon to Harrington House, in Stable-yard,
St. James's, where I was introduced to Lord and Lady Harrington, and all
the Stanhopes. On entering a long gallery, I found the whole family
engaged in their sempiternal occupation of tea-drinking. Neither in
Nankin, Pekin, nor Canton was the teapot more assiduously and constantly
replenished than at this hospitable mansion. I was made free of the
corporation, if I may use the phrase, by a cup being handed to me; and I
must say that I never tasted any tea so good before or since.

As an example of the undeviating tea-table habits of the house of
Harrington, General Lincoln Stanhope once told me that, after an absence
of several years in India, he made his reappearance at Harrington House,
and found the family, as he had left them on his departure, drinking tea
in the long gallery. On his presenting himself, his father's only
observation and speech of welcome to him was, "Hallo, Linky, my dear
boy! delighted to see you. Have a cup of tea?"


LORD ALVANLEY
[Sidenote: _Captain Gronow_]

From the time of good Queen Bess, when the English language first began
to assume somewhat of its present form, idiom, and mode of expression,
to the day of our most gracious sovereign Queen Victoria, every age has
had its punsters, humorists, and eloquent conversationalists; but I much
doubt whether the year 1789 did not produce the greatest wit of modern
times, in the person of William Lord Alvanley.

After receiving a very excellent and careful education, Alvanley entered
the Coldstream Guards at an early age, and served with distinction at