264 The Soverane Herbe 



a periwig and a coat laden with powder as white 

 as miller's, a face besmeared with snuff, and a few 

 affected airs.' To take snuff was then as essential 

 a part of gallantry as to drink tobacco had been a 

 century before. Into the middle of this century a 

 snuff-box and a gold-headed cane survived as the 

 professional equipment of a physician. 



A gentleman who did not take snuff was a con- 

 tradiction in terms. It is impossible to imagine 

 that age without its constant attendant and master, 

 snuff. Snuff forms as integral a part of the eighteenth 

 century as its belaced and gallant clothes ; its 

 jewelled fingers sought the snuff-box instinctively ; 

 to its cynicism, its affectations, its gallantry, its 

 dilettantism, its extravagance and licentiousness, snuff 

 must be added to comprehend it. 



In a manner similar to its treatise on the use of 

 the fan the Spectator propounded 'The Ceremony 

 of the Snuff-box, or Rules for offering Snuff to a 

 Stranger, a Friend or a Mistress, according to the 

 Degrees of Familiarity and Distance, with Explana- 

 tions of the Careless, the Scornful, the Politick, and 

 the Surly Pinch and the Gestures proper to each of 

 them.' 



Ladies snuffed as artistically and vigorously as 

 men, and thereby incurred the censure and satire of 

 contemporary writers. In 17 12 the Spectator ■v/rote. : 

 'This silly trick is attended with such a coquettish 

 air in some ladies, and such a sedate masculine one 

 in others, that I cannot tell which most to complain 

 of; but they are to me equally disagreeable. . . . 

 As to those who take it for no other end but to 



