250 PERSECUTION. 
‘snuff, anathematizing those who should use it in any 
church, and positively threatening with excommunication all 
impious persons who should provoke a profane sneeze within 
the sacred precincts of St. Peter’s pile; Louis XIV., that 
good son of the Church, filially complied with the paternal 
injunction, but his courtiers were less yielding; and the 
-ante-chamber of Versailles frequently resounded with the 
‘effects of the pleasant stimulant. 
“All persecution has a distinct tendency to establish the 
object of its hate, and so it was with the subject of our arti- 
cle—it only required to be loved; and I do not doubt that, 
had circumstances required them, snuff would have found 
itsmartyrs. Its use was not general in England until Charles 
II. introduced it, upon his return from exile, with other 
important fashions. It had been known and used before, as 
had the periwig, but it was not until his reign that it became 
common. When the Stuarts relieved the country of their 
presence for the second and last time, it had become firmly 
established ; and, by the days of good Queen Anne, was such 
a necessary of life, that there were in the metropolis alone 
no less than seven thousand shops where the snuff-boxes of 
the Londoners could be replenished. 
“At that time, indeed, gallants were as proud of their 
jewelled boxes of amber, porcelain, ebony and agate as they 
were of their flowing wigs and clouded canes, the handles of 
which were not unfrequently constructed to hold the cherished 
dust. We are told by courtly Dick Steel, that 2 handsome 
snuff-box was as much an essential of ‘the fine gentleman’ 
as his gilt chariot, diamond ring, and brocade sword-knot. 
We know them to have been manufactured of the costliest 
material, heavy with gold and brilliant with jewels, as they 
needed to be when their masters carried wigs ‘high on the 
shoulder in a basket borne,’ worth forty or fifty guineas, and 
wore enough Flanders lace upon their persons to have stocked 
a milliner’s stall in New England. 
“Unfortunately, but very naturally, this extravagance 
rendered snuff a butt for the wits (who all took it, by the 
way), to shoot at. Steele, whose weakness for dress and 
show were proverbial, levelled many of his blunt shafts at its 
use; and Pope, who himself tells us ‘of his wig all pow- 
der and all snuff his band,’ let fly one of his keener arrows 
at the beaux, whose wit lay in their snuff-boxes and tweezer 
eases. As the men laid by, in the Georgian era, much of the 
magnificence of their attire, so their snuff-boxes became 
