SMOKING CUSTOMS. 65 



author, is to do the same. He furnishes another 

 legend of its origin by imagining a fair nymph of Vir- 

 ginia whom Jove visits in the garb of a shepherd, 

 and Juno changes into the herb. Esculapius 



" Descried this herbe to our new golden age, 

 And did devise a pipe, which should asswage 

 The wounds which sorrow in our hearts did fix ; " 



and he further declares, that had the Romans known it, 

 instead of a Saturnalia, 



" A new Tabacconalla had been made. 



All goods, all pleasures in it it doth linke — 

 'Tis phisicke, clothing, music, meat and drink." 



In Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour 

 (1599), one of the characters, Fastidious Brisk, an 

 impersonation of the "swell" of his day, takes tobacco, 

 attended by a boy to trim the pipe ; and makes love to 

 his mistress, between the whiffs he puffs forth in 

 smoking. In Heywood's Fair Maid of the Exchange 

 (1607), one of the characters is advised to court a girl 

 by " asking her if she'll take a pipe of tobacco." In 

 Edward Sharpham's comedy, The Fleirc (1615), one 

 " Signior Petoune, a traveller and a great tobacconist,"* 

 is one of the characters introduced as a type of the 

 fashionable smoker of the day. He says, " I take it 

 now and then, fasting, for the purification of my wit," 

 and he tells the ladies, " If you use but a' mornings 



* Smokers, it must be remembered, were then termed tobacconists, a 

 name now exclusively applied to vendors of the herb. 



