256 NABCOTIC USAGES AND STJP.EKSTITIONS 



constantly smoking of tobacco, and in this manner : they have pipes 

 on purpose made of clay, into the further end of which they put the 

 herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into 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 it plenty of phlegm, 

 and defluxion of the head." 



To this it is, that Justice Overdoo refers in Ben Jonson's " Bar- 

 tholomew Fair," (Act II.., Scene VI.) " Nay, the hole in the 

 nose here, of some tobacco-takers, or the third nostril, if I may so 

 call it, which makes that they can vent the tobacco out, like the ace 

 of clubs, or rather the flower-de-lice, is caused from the tobacco, the 

 mere tobacco!" and so also, in a passage already referred to, in 

 Warner's " Albion's England," the " Indian weed fumes away from 

 •nostrils and from throats" of ladies, as well as lords and grooms. 



The minute size of the most ancient of the British tobacco pipes 

 which has led to their designation as those of the Elves or Eairies, 

 may therefore be much more certainly ascribed to the mode of using 

 the tobacco, which rendered the contents of the smallest of them a 

 sufficient dose, than to any economic habits in those who indulged in 

 the novel luxury. In this opinion I am further confirmed by observ- 

 ing the same miniature characteristics mark various specimens of 

 antique native pipes of a peculiar class to which I have already referred 

 as found in Canada, and which appear to be such as, in all probability 

 were in use, and furnished the models of the English clay pipes of 

 the sixteenth century. But if the date thus assigned for the earliest 

 English clay pipes be the true one, it has an important bearing on a 

 much wider question ; and as a test of the value to be attached to 

 popular traditions, may suggest the revision of more than one 

 archaeological theory based on the trustworthiness of such evidence. 

 A contributor to " Notes and Queries,"* quotes some dogrel lines 

 printed in the " Harleian Miscellany" in 1624, where speaking of 

 the good old times of Xing Harry the Eighth, smoking is thus 

 ludicrously described as a recent novelty : — 



"Nor did (hat time know 

 To puff and to blow, 

 In a piece of white clay 

 As you do at this day, 

 With fier arid coale 

 And a leafe in a hole 1" 



These lines are ascribed in the original to Skelton, who died in 

 1529, and by a course of reasoning which seems to run somewhat in 



•Notes and Queries. Vol. VII., p. 230. 



