128 TOBACCO IN EUROPE. 



Tobacco, and " the consumption of tobacco was then 

 proportionally greater, considering the population, 

 than it is at the present time." The golden names of 

 literature patronised the custom. Addison, Congreve, 

 Phillips, Prior, and Steele, consumed tobacco; Pope 

 and Swift, following the favourite example of the Con- 

 tinental clergy, took snuff. In the days of the 

 Regency, no French abbe was without his box, and as 

 the rank of the clergy so was the indulgence in the 

 " pungent dust," rendered more recherche and ex- 

 pensive by the perfection of its quality and scent. 



•The author of the Beau in a Wood (1701), speaks 

 of the enormous wigs then in fashion, as generally 

 " scented with tobacco." 



In 1703, one Lawrence Spooner, emulous of the 

 fame of King James or Du Bartas, published some 

 quaint rhymes, which he called A Looking-Glass for 

 Smoakers ; his rhymes are, as Dogberry would say, 

 "most tolerable, and not to be endured," but his 

 preface (fortunately in prose) lets us into the secret of 

 the very general practice of smoking in England at 

 his period ; "in two miles compass may be found a 

 thousand families or persons in country villages, that 

 one with another, do smoak, snuff, or chaw, the year 

 round, one penny a day, and most of these coal or 

 lime-men, firemen, &c." He then goes on to demon- 

 strate that 1525L a year, is the cost of this, which in 

 twenty years would double itself at the interest of a 

 shilling in the pound ; but, " if improv'd thriftily, in 

 twenty years it would amount to more than s£ 130,000 



