250 PERSECUTION. 



snuff, anathematizing those who should use it in any 

 church, and positively threatening with excommunication all 

 impious persons who should provoke a profane sneeze within 

 the sacred precincts of St. Peter's pile; Louis XIV., that 

 good son of the Church, filially complied with the paternal 

 injunction, but his courtiers were less yielding ; and the 

 ante-chamber of Versailles frequently resounded with the 

 effects of the pleasant stimulant. 



"All persecution has a distinct tendency to establish the 

 object of its hate, and so it was with the subject of our arti- 

 cle it only required to be loved ; and I do not doubt that, 

 had circumstances required them, snuff would have found 

 its martyrs. Its use was not general in England until Charles 

 II. introduced it, upon his return from exile, with other 

 important fashions. It had been known and used before, as 

 had the periwig, but it was not until his reign that it became 

 common. When the Stuarts relieved the country of their 

 presence for the second and last time, it had become firmly 

 established ; and, by the days of good Queen Anne, was such 

 a necessary of life, that there were in the metropolis alone 

 no less than seven thousand shops where the snuff-boxes of 

 the Londoners could be replenished. 



"At that time, indeed, gallants were as proud of their 

 jewelled boxes of amber, porcelain, ebony and agate as they 

 were of their flowing wigs and clouded canes, the handles of 

 which were not unf requently constructed to hold the cherished 

 dust. "We are told by courtly Dick Steel, that a handsome 

 snuff-box was as much an essential of ' the fine gentleman ' 

 as his gilt chariot, diamond ring, and brocade sword-knot. 

 We know them to have been manufactured of the costliest 

 material, heavy with gold and brilliant with jewels, as they 

 needed to be when their masters carried wigs ' high on the 

 shoulder in a basket borne,' worth forty or fifty guineas, and 

 wore enough Flanders lace upon their persons to have stocked 

 a milliner's stall in New England. 



" Unfortunately, but very naturally, this extravagance 

 rendered snuff a butt for the wits (who all took it, by the 

 way), to shoot at. Steele, whose weakness for dress and 

 show were proverbial, levelled many of his blunt shafts at its 

 use ; and Pope, who himself tells us * of his wig all pow- 

 der and all snuff his band,' let fly one of his keener arrows 

 at the beaux, whose wit lay in their snuff-boxes and tweezer 

 cases. As the men laid by, in the Georgian era, much of the 

 magnificence of their attire, so their snuff-boxes became 



