SMOKING TAUGHT. 95 
nor in any other age? No one can dispute that he drew the 
life that he saw moving around him. He sketched these 
creatures because they were before his eyes and were his 
enemies or his associates; they live still because their creator’s 
genius was Promethean, and endowed them with immortality. 
Bardolph, Moth, Slender, Abhorson, Don Armado, Mercutio, 
etc., are portraits, as everyone knows and feels who is con- 
versant with the manners of the Elizabethan times as 
handed down in old plays. 
“If Shakespeare’s contemporaries were silent about the 
then new fashion of smoking, we should not so much wonder 
at Shakespeare’s taciturnity. But Decker’s and Ben Jon-- 
son’s works abound in allusions to tobacco, its uses and 
abuses. The humorist and satirist lost no opportunity of. 
deriding the new fashion and its followers. The tobacco 
merchant was an important person in London of James the 
First’s time—with his Winchester pipes, his maple cutting- 
blocks, his juniper-wood charcoal fires, and his silver tongs 
with which to hand the hot charcoal to his customers, 
although he was shrewdly suspected of adulterating the 
precious weed with sack lees and oil. It was his custom to 
wash the tobacco in muscadel and grains, and to keep it 
moist by wrapping it in greased leather and oiled rags, or by 
burying it in gravel. The Elizabethan pipes were so small 
that now when they are dug up in Ireland the poor call them 
‘fairy pipes’ from their tininess. These pipes became known 
by the nickname of ‘the woodcock’s heads.’ The apotheca- 
ries, who sold the best tobacco, became masters of the art, 
and received pupils, whom they taught to exhale the smoke. 
in little globes, rings, or the ‘Euripus.’ ‘The slights’ these 
tricks were called. Ben Jonson facetiously makes these 
professors boast of being able to take three whifis, then to 
take horse, and evolve the smoke—one whiff on Hounslow, a 
second at Staines, and a third at Bagshot. \ 
“The ordinary gallant, like Mercutio, would smoke while 
the dinner was serving up. Those who were rich and 
foolish carried with them smoking apparatus of gold or 
silver—tobacco-box, snuff-ladle, tongs to take up charcoal, and 
ee irons. There seems, from Decker’s ‘Gull’s Horn- 
ook,” to have been smoking clubs, or tobacco ordinaries as 
they were called, where the entire talk was of the best shops 
for buying Trinidado, the Nicotine, the Cane, and the Pud- 
ding, whose pipe had the best bore, which would turn 
blackest, and which would break in the browning. At the 
theatres, the rakes and spendthrifts who, crowded the stage 
