PEEVALENCE OF SMOKING. 121 



tobacco as they ride along, to the great admiration and 

 delight of all the spectators." * 



Tobacco had long before this assumed a fixed position 

 as a favourite luxury all over Europe. After its intro- 

 duction to the East at the close of the sixteenth 

 century, it became a prime favourite there. In Persia 

 it conquered Shah Abbas, who first opposed its use by 

 cruel penalties, and on one occasion threw an unfortu- 

 nate vendor into the fire with his goods ; but the love 

 for the indulgence was too well spread, and he suc- 

 cumbed. The Turks, as we have noted, had similar 

 persecutions to encounter, after the custom had become 

 all but universal among them, the Sultan, Amurath IV., 

 having taken into his head that smoking made 

 men impotent ; an opinion also held by Sir William 

 Vaughan in his Directions for Health (1613), and again 

 made the subject of a jocular treatise in 1675, called 

 The woman's complaint against Tobacco. Dr. Brown 

 in his Travels in Germany (1677), mentions having 

 seen in Vienna the followers of the Cham of Tartary, 

 and says " they took much tobacco in very long pipes ; 

 their tobacco not in rolls, but in leaves, and dry." 

 The Chinese obtained the herb from the Portuguese, 

 and often employed it in place of opium. In Eussia it 

 was prohibited, because a few instances of fires oc- 

 curred in Moscow, occasioned by persons dropping 

 asleep with lighted pipes. A law was for a very short 



* Jordan's London Triumphant ; or the City in Jollity and Splendor, a 

 pamphlet descriptive of the Lord Mayor's Show in the above year. 



