Tobacco in English Social Life 6i 



favour and use among the English. Recommended 

 by doctors as a cure for and preventive against nearly 

 every ill, they learned to love it for its intrinsic 

 qualities and to smoke it for the pleasure and com- 

 fort it afforded. Never was a medicine so eagerly 

 accepted by a nation. It was pleasant, and one in- 

 dulged in the divine herb, as Spenser had already 

 christened it, with the pleasing and soothing reflection 

 that thereby health was being maintained and disease 

 scouted. Thus quietly a great social revolution was 

 accomplished. The sturdy yeoman and the cultured 

 scholar, the wise statesman and the gallant sailor, all 

 classes of English men and women, became ardent 

 users of tobacco. 



Hentzer, a German lawyer, who visited England 

 in 1598, has recorded the then universal use of tobacco. 

 At the Bear Gardens, Southwark, ' and everywhere 

 else the English are constantly smoking and in this 

 manner : They have pipes on purpose, made of clay, 

 into the farther end of which they put the herb, so 

 dry that it may be rubbed to powder, and putting 

 fire to it, they draw the smoke into their mouths, 

 which they puff out again through their nostrils like 

 funnels along with plenty of phlegm and defluxion 

 from the head.' 



'Drinking tobacco' was the term then applied to 

 smoking, and this is still the phrase in Egypt and 

 India. From this natural description of the inspira- 

 tion of smoke anti-tobacconists have drawn arguments 

 supporting their contention that smoking leads to 

 drinking ! Until the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century ' tobacconist ' was the term applied, not to 



