266 The Soverane Herbe 



and tapping the box were reduced to a fine art. 

 There was a fashion in snuff as well as in clothes ; 

 the one proclaimed the gentleman as much as the 

 other. Brummel and the Regent had a knack, much 

 admired, of holding their snuff-box in and opening it 

 with the left hand only. 



Defoe complained that his servant-maid took her 

 snuff with the air of a duchess. 



' Do you do anything with this ?' inquired Mr, 

 Smauker, producing a snuff-box decorated with a 

 fox's-head. 



' No,' replied Sam Weller, ' not without sneezing.' 



' It is rather difficult,' said Mr. Smauker patroniz- 

 ingly. ' Many carry coffee, which looks like rappee.' 



This was written of 1827, when snuff had lost much 

 of its fashionability. Throughout the eighteenth 

 century snuff was the firmly established objet de 

 fashionables. In that age of beaux snuff reigned 

 paramount. It was carried to an excess characteristic 

 of that age ; only natural, indeed, were those excesses. 

 It was an age of extremes, of struggles with primal 

 elements uncloaked by the indifference of this cen- 

 tury. The life or death struggle that England was 

 engaged in reflected itself in the foppery and the 

 poverty, the stark atheism, with hard drinking, high 

 gambling and fashionable viciousness, and the religious 

 enthusiasm of English society, in the eighteenth cen- 

 tury. Its men were of sterner mould than this 

 generation, reared and bred in an age of compromise. 



Snuff, and particularly the snuff-box, occupied a 

 position in the national life held by no other object 

 before or since. Snuff-boxes became the gauge of 



