8o The Soverane Herbe 



sistibly comical. At the word of command from the 

 pedagogue pipes were produced, and arithmetic was 

 abandoned for tobacco, writing for smoking. The 

 lighted splinter of wood was passed along the benches, 

 pipes were kindled, and the dingy schoolhouse filled 

 with smoke to the chorus of coughs as the smoke 

 choked the still unseasoned throats of the pupils. 

 For allowing his pipe to expire an urchin is called 

 out. And his excuse, ' Please, sir, it wouldn't draw,' 

 would not save him a flogging. To a scholar 

 especially backward in smoking the master gave 

 a lesson in the art of inhaling and expelling the 

 fume evenly. 



That M. Jorevin de Rochefort's story is not a 

 traveller's lie nor the imposition of perfidious Albion 

 on a too credulous Frenchman is abundantly proved 

 by contemporary records. Hearne, in his diary, 

 after speaking of the use of tobacco during the Great 

 Plague, says : ' Even children were obliged to smoak. 

 And I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, 

 who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was a 

 schoolboy at Eton that year when the Plague raged 

 all the boys of that school were obliged to smoak in 

 the school every morning, and that he was never 

 whipped so much in his life as he was one morning 

 for not smoaking.' It would be difficult, we imagine, 

 in this year of grace to find a schoolboy who would 

 refuse to smoke on being ordered to do so. 



A writer of the period laments his absolute inability 

 to check the practice of smoking. ' You are sensible,' 

 he writes with mournful resignation, ' to the state of 

 things that children smoke more nowadays than 



