SMOKING TAUGHT. 95 



nor in any other age? No one can dispute that he drew the 

 life that he saw moving around him. He sketched these 

 creatures because they were before his eyes and were his 

 enemies or his associates ; they live still because their creator's 

 genius was Promethean, and endowed them with immortality. 

 Bardolph, Moth, Slender, Abhorson, Don Armado, Mercutio, 

 etc., are portraits, as everyone knows and feels who is con- 

 versant with the manners of the Elizabethan times as 

 handed down in old plays. 



"If Shakespeare's contemporaries were silent about the 

 then new fashion of smoking, we should not so much wonder 

 at Shakespeare's taciturnity. But Decker's and Ben Jon- 

 son's works abound in allusions to tobacco, its uses and 

 abuses. The humorist and satirist lost no opportunity of 

 deriding the new fashion and its followers. The tobacco 

 merchant was an important person in London of James the 

 First's time with his Winchester pipes, his maple cutting- 

 blocks, his juniper-wood charcoal fires, and his silver tongs 

 with which to hand the hot charcoal to his customers, 

 although he was shrewdly suspected of adulterating the 

 precious weed with sack lees and oil. It was his custom to 

 wash the tobacco in muscadel and grains, and to keep it 

 moist by wrapping it in greased leather and oiled rags, or by 

 burying it in gravel. The Elizabethan pipes were so small 

 that now when they are dug up in Ireland the poor call them 

 * fairy pipes ' from their tininess. These pipes became known 

 by the nickname of ' the woodcock's heads.' The apotheca- 

 ries, who sold the best tobacco, became masters of the art, 

 and received pupils, whom they taught to exhale the smoke 

 in little globes, rings, or the * Euripus.' c The slights' these 

 tricks were called. Ben Jonson facetiously makes these 

 professors boast of being able to take three whiffs, then to 

 take horse, and evolve the smoke one whiff on Hounslow, a 

 second at Staines, and a third at Bagshot. 



" The ordinary gallant, like Mercutio, would smoke while 

 the dinner was serving up. Those who were rich and 

 foolish carried with _ them smoking apparatus of gold or 

 silver tobacco-box, snuff-ladle, tongs to take up charcoal, and 

 priming irons. There seems, from Decker's ' Gull's Horn- 

 Book," to have been smoking clubs, or tobacco ordinaries as 

 they were called, where the entire talk was of the best shops 

 for buying Trinidado, the Nicotine, the Cane, and the Pud- 

 ding, whose pipe had the best bore, which would turn, 

 blackest, and which would break in the browning. At the 

 theatres, the rakes and spendthrifts who, crowded the stage 



