LADY SMOKERS. 07 



intolerable." The Duke is represented in the same 

 author's play, What you Will (1607), smoking among 

 the ladies, and lighting his pipe with a petition sent to 

 him. 



In 1002, when Dekker printed his Satiromastix, 

 ladies smoked. Asinius Babo, offering his pipe, ob- 

 serves: — "'Tis at your service gallants, and the tobacco 

 too : 'tis right pudding, I can tell you ; a lady or two 

 took a pipe full or two at my hands, and praised it, fore 

 the heavens." * 



Prynne, the famous Puritanic inveigher against stage- 

 plays, tells us that in his time, ladies at the theatre 

 were sometimes " offered the tobacco-pipe " as a re- 

 freshment instead of apples,f which appear to have 

 been " the staple commodity." Mary King, better 

 known as " Moll Cutpurse," that 



"Bold Virago stout and tall," 



as described by Butler in his Hudibras, is depicted on 

 the title-page of Middleton's comedy, The Roaring 

 Girle, of which she is the heroine, in the costume of a 

 man smoking tobacco (the upper part of the cut is here 



* Dekker, in his GulVs Horn-book, thus apostrophises tobacco : — 

 "Make me thine adopted heir, that, inheriting the virtues of thy whiffes, 

 I may distribute them amongst all nations, and make the fantastic English- 

 man, above the rest, more cunniug in the distinction of thy roll Trinidado, 

 leaf, and pudding, than the whitest-toothed black-a-moor in all Asia." 

 Dr. Nott, in a note, thinks these the three kinds of tobacco mentioned by 

 Ben Jonson in Cynthia's Revels : — Dekker also speaks of gallants "able to 

 discourse -whether your cane or your pudding be sweetest, and which pipe 

 has the best bore, and which burns black, which breaks in the burning." 



f Histriomastix, 1633, marginal note to page 363. 



p 2 



