OE THE OLD AND NEW WORLD. 



257 



a circle, it is assumed that they cannot be his, because tobacco was 

 not introduced into England " till 1565 or thereabouts." Brand in 

 his " Popular Antiquities," ascribes its introduction to Drake in 

 1586 ; while the old keep at Cawdor, already referred to, with its 

 sculptured reynard and his pipe, would carry it back to 1510, and by 

 implication still nearer the fifteenth century. So peculiar a custom 

 as smoking, would no doubt, at first be chiefly confined to such as 

 had acquired a taste for it in the countries from whence it was bor- 

 rowed, and until its more general diffusion had created a demand for 

 tobacco, as well as for the pipe required for its use, the smoker who 

 had not acquired an Indian pipe along with the " Indian weed," 

 would have to depend on chance, or his own ingenuity, for the 

 materials requisite for its enjoyment. Hence an old diarist writing 

 about 1680, tells us of the tobacco smokers : — " They first bad silver 

 pipes, but the ordinary sort made use of a walnut shell and a straw. 

 I have heard my grandfather say that one pipe was handed from man 

 to man round the table. Within these thirty-five years 'twas 

 scandalous for a divine to take tobacco. It was then sold for its 

 weight in silver. I have heard some of our old yeomen neighbours 

 say, that when they went to market they culled out their biggest 

 shillings to lay in the scales against the tobacco ; now the customs 

 of it are the greatest his majestie hath." In the interval between 

 the primitive walnut-shell pipe, or the single clay pipe for a whole 

 company to partake of the costly luxury, and this later era of its 

 abundant use, the supply of pipes had, no doubt, kept pace with 

 that of the tobacco, and they had undergone such alterations in form 

 as were requisite to adapt them to its later mode of use. Their 

 material also had become so uniform, and so well recognised, that a 

 clay pipe appears to have been regarded, in the seventeenth century 

 as the sole implement applicable to the smoker's art. An old string 

 of rhymed interogatories, printed in Wit's Recreations, a rare miscel- 

 lany of 1640, thus quaintly sets forth this idea: — 



"If all the world were sand, 



Oh, then what should we lack'o ; 

 If as they say there were no clay, 



How should we take tobacco?" 



Towards the latter end of the sixteenth, and in the early years of 

 the seventeenth century, under any view of the case, small clay pipes, 

 such as Teniers and Ostade put into the mouths of their Boors, must 

 have been in common use throughout the British Islands. They have 

 been dredged in numbers from the bed of the Thames, found in 



