78 TOBACCO IN EUROPE. 



the Muscovites followed suit ; the King of Persia, 

 Amurath IV. of Turkey, the Emperor Jehan-Geer, and 

 - others, all joined the crusade.* Arming themselves 

 with scourges, halters, knives, and bearing gibbets on 

 their banners, they denounced death to all found 

 inhaling fumes of the plant through a tube, or caught 

 with a pellet of it under their tongues. Such as used 

 it as a sternutative only were dealt with more gently — 

 they were merely to be deprived of their organs of 

 smelling — of nostrils and nose. To perfect the 

 miseries of the pitiable delinquents, Urban VIII. went 

 in awful pomp to the Vatican, where, tremulous with 

 holy anger, he shook his garments to intimate that the 

 blood of the offenders would be on their own heads, 

 and then thundered excommunication on every soul 

 who took the accursed thing, in any shape, into a 

 church ! f 



Was ever destruction of body and spirit threatened 

 so unjustly ? Mutilation for taking a pinch ! Loss of 

 life for lighting a pipe ! Exclusion from heaven for 

 perhaps harmlessly reviving attention to a wearisome 

 sermon in chapel or church ! Merciful heavens ! what 

 comminations these to emanate from Christian kin as 



* In Eussia it was punished with amputation of the nose ; and in the 



Swiss canton of Berne it ranked in the table of offences next to adultery ; 



even so late as the middle of the last century, a particular court was held 



there for trying delinquents. But persecution only increased the prac- 



**>* tice. 



+ Urban VIII. in 1624 published a decree of excommunication against 

 such as used tobacco in churches, and Innocent XII., a.d. 1690, solemnly 

 excommunicated all those who should "take snuif or tobacco in St. Peter's 

 at Rome." 



