CHAPTER VI 



ON THE ANTIQUITY OF TOBACCO-SMOKING 



LIKE Horace's greybeard, we are all more or less prone to 

 look lovingly towards the past, to regard the days of our 

 forefathers as the good old times in which they played their 

 part in life's drama on a larger and nobler scale than we do, 

 or are capable of doing. In this spirit of admiration for 

 antiquity we see the beginnings of that hero-worship which 

 with the Greeks gradually developed into their beautiful 

 mythology. They, above all other people, delighted to 

 extol the powers and achievements of their ancestors ; they 

 clothed them with the attributes of deity, and strove to 

 emulate and honour them in all manly deeds ; thus they 

 exalted their own conceptions of life, and idealised the 

 course of their national existence. And yet this innate 

 tendency to magnify and extend into the dim, illimitable 

 regions of antiquity whatever of human effort is deemed 

 most worthy, is a. source of difficulty to the conscientious 

 student. Amid the wild growth of myth and marvel the 

 antiquary or archaeologist warily treads his way to surer 

 ground, and out of scattered fragments of a by-gone age 

 constructs anew an old order of existence, or opens a vista 

 to the mind's eye through which glimpses may be gained of 

 the habits and inner life of our remote ancestors. Then it 

 is we see the present linked with the past in one unbroken 



