Chapter VII: PIPES AND SMOKERS. (Continued.) (3)

"Let, then, the moralist point out what social duties may be
imperilled; let the physician apprise us of the disorders to
be guarded against; and let the lover of elegance see that
no neglect or slight awaits her. Of abstract arguments we
have seen the futility, of moral and medical crusades even
the most patient are weary, and we gladly turn to something
real, in the suffrages of a by-gone great man of
acknowledged fame--Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson loved the 'durne
weed,' and describes its every accident with the gusto of a
connoisseur. Hobbes smoked, after his early dinner, pipes
innumerable. Milton never went to bed without a pipe and a
glass of water, which I cannot help associating with his:

'Adam waked,
So custom'd, for his sleep was æry light, of pure digestion bred
And temperate vapors bland!'

"Sir Isaac Newton was smoking in his garden at Woolsthorpe
when the apple fell. Addison had a pipe in his mouth at all
hours, at 'Buttons.' Fielding both smoked and chewed. About
1740 it became unfashionable, and was banished from St.
James' to the country squires and parsons. Squire Western,
in _Tom Jones_, arriving in town, sends off Parson Supple to
Basingstoke, where he had left his Tobacco-box! The
snuff-box was substituted. Lord Mark Kerr, a brave officer
who affected the _petit maitre_ (_à la_ Pelham, in Lord
Lytton's second novel), invented the invisible hinges, and
it was this 'going out of fashion' that Jonson alluded to in
1774.

"We next find Tobacco rearing its head under the auspices of
Paley and Parr. Paley had one of the most orderly minds ever
given to man. A vein of shrewd and humorous sarcasm,
together with an under-current of quiet selfishness, made
him a very pleasant companion. 'I cannot afford to keep a
conscience any more than a carriage,' was worthy of Erasmus,
perhaps of Robelais. 'Our delight was,' said an old
Jonsonian to the writer, 'to get old Paley, on a cold
winter's night, to put up his legs, wrap them well up, stir
the fire, and fill him a long Dutch pipe; he would talk
away, sir, like a being of a higher sphere. He declined
any punch, but drank it up as fast as we replenished his
glass. He would smoke any given quantity of Tobacco, and
drink any _given_ quantity of punch.'

"Parr smoked ostentatiously and vainly, as he did
everything. He used only the finest Tobacco, half-filling
his pipe with salt. He wrote and read, and smoked and wrote,
rising early, and talking fustian. He was a sort of
miniature Brummagem Johnson. Except his preface to
_Bellendenus_, you might burn all he has written. His 'Life
of Fox' is beneath contempt. His letters are simply
laughable, especially his characters of contemporaries. He,
however, was an amiable and good-natured man, and had
sufficient humanity to regard dissent as an impediment to
his recognition of intellectual or moral worth. Parr was an
arrogant old coxcomb, who abused the respectful kindness he
received, and took his pipe into drawing-rooms. I pass over
the Duke of Bridgewater, because he was early crossed in
love by a most beautiful girl, could not bear the sight of a
flower even growing, and passed life in a pot-house with a
pipe, listening to Brindley, whose intellect and dialect
must have been alike incomprehensible to him.

"The cigar appeared about 1812; it received the countenance
of the Regent, who had hitherto confined himself to macobau
snuff, scented with lavender and the tonquin bean. Porson
smoked many bundles of cheroots, which nabobs began to
import. After 1815 the continental visits were resumed, and
the practice of smoking began steadily to increase. The
German china bowl with globular receiver of the essential
oil, the absorbent meerschaum, the red Turkish bell-shaped
clay, the elaborate hookah,--a really elegant ornament, and
perhaps the most healthful and rational form of
smoking,--pipes of all shapes, began to fill the shops of
London. Coleridge, when cured of opium, took to snuff. Byron
wrote dashingly about 'sublime Tobacco,' but I do not think
he carried the practice to excess. Shelley never smoked, nor
Wordsworth, nor Keats. Campbell loved a pipe. John Gibson
Lockhart was seldom without a cigar. Sir Walter Scott smoked
in his carriage, and regularly after dinner, loving both
pipes and cigars. Professor Wilson smoked steadily, as did
Charles Lamb. Carlyle, now somewhat past seventy, has been a
sturdy smoker for years. Goethe did not smoke, neither did
Shakespeare. I cannot recall a single allusion to Tobacco in
all his plays; even Sir Toby Belch does not add the pipe to
his burnt sack. But Shakespeare hated every form of
debauchery. The penitence of Cassio is more prominent than
was his fun. 'What! drunk? and talk fustian and speak
parrot, and discourse with one's shadow?' Shakespeare held
drunkenness in disgust. Even Falstaff is more an
intellectual man than a sot. What actor could play Falstaff
after riding forty miles and being well thrashed? Yet, when
Falstaff sustains the evening at the Boar's Head, he has
ridden to Gadshill and back, forty-four miles! No palsied
sot, he. Hamlet's disgust at his countrymen is well known.
'Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!' is the
comment on the drunken Kit Sly. In short, when you look at
the smooth, happy, half-feminine face of Shakespeare, you
see one to whom all forms of debauchery were ungenial. A
courtier certainly, and a lover of money. The king had
written against Tobacco, and Will Shakespeare set his watch
to the time. Raleigh and Coliban Jonson might smoke at the
Mermaid--Will kept his head clear and his doublet sweet.

"Alfred Tennyson is a persistent smoker of some forty years.
Dickens, Jerrold and Thackeray all puffed. Lord Lytton loves
a long pipe at night and cigars by day. Lord Houghton smokes
moderately. The late J. M. Kemble, author of 'The Seasons in
England,' was a tremendous smoker. Moore cared not for it;
indeed, I think that Irish gentlemen smoke much less than
English. Wellington shunned it; so did Peel. D'Israeli loved
the long pipe in his youth, but in middle age pronounced it
'the tomb of love.' While I am writing, it is not too much
to aver that 99 persons out of 100, taken at random, under
forty years of age, smoke habitually every day of their
lives. How many in Melbourne injure wealth and brain, I
leave to more skilled and morose critics. But my mind
misgives me. Paralysis is becoming very frequent.

"I have seen stone pipes from Gambia, shaped like the letter
U consisting each of one solid flint, hollowed through,
also hookahs made by sailors with cocoanut shells. All,
however, now agree that it is impossible to have either
comfortable, cool, or safe smoking, unless through a
substance like clay, porous and absorbent, especially as
portable pipes are the mode. Those of black charcoal are not
handsome; indeed, I always feel like a mute at a funeral
while smoking one, but they are delightfully cool, absorbing
more essential oil of nicotine, and more quickly than any
meerschaum. I caution the smoker to have an old glove on; as
these pipes 'sweat,' the oil comes through, and nothing is
more pertinacious than oil of tobacco when it sinks into
your pores, or floats about hair or clothes. My own taste
inclines to the German receiver, long cherry tube and amber,
and to my own garden, for all street smoking is unæsthetic,
and the traveller by coach, boat, or rail has the tastes of
others to consult. Surely it is not urbane to throw on
another the burden of saying that he likes not the smell or
the inhaling of burning tobacco. Better postpone your solace
to more fitting time and place--the close of day and your
own veranda. Indoor smoking is detestable. Life has few
direr disenchanters than the morning smells of obsolete
tobacco, relics though they be of hesternal beatitude. Give
me, in robe or jacket, a hookah, or German arrangement,
Chinese recumbency in matted and moistened veranda, and the
odors of fresh growing beds of flowers wafted by the
southern breeze. Nor be wanting the fragrant perfume of
coffee. 'Meat without salt,' says Hafiz, 'is even as tobacco
without coffee.' The tannin of the coffee corrects the
nicotine. And it may not be amiss to learn that a plate of
watercress, salt, and a large glass of cold water should be
at hand to the smoker by day; the watercress corrects any
excess, and is at hand in a garden. Smoke not before
breakfast, nor till an hour has elapsed after a good meal.
Smoke not with or before wine, you destroy the wine-palate.
If you love tea, postpone pipe till after it; no man can
enjoy fine tea who has smoked. In short, smoke not till the
day is done, with all its tasks and duties.

"I have seen men of pretension and position treat carpets
most contumeliously, trampling on the pride of Plato with a
recklessness that would bring a blush to the cheek of
Diogenes himself. Can they forget the absorbent powers of
carpet tissues, and the horrors of next morning to
non-smokers, perhaps to ladies? Surely this is unæsthetic
and illiberal: it is in an old man most pitiable, in a young
one intolerable, in a scholar inexcusable, from an
uncleanness that seems willful. Let the young philosopher
avoid such practice, and give a wide berth to those who
follow them. Take the following rules, tyro, _meo
periculo_:--

1. Never smoke when the pores are open: they absorb, and you
are unfit for decent society. Be it your study ever to
escape the noses of strangers. First impressions are
sometimes permanent, and you may lose a useful acquaintance.

2. Learn to smoke slowly. Cultivate 'calm and intermittent
puffs.'--_Walter Scott._

3. On the first symptom of expectoration lay down the pipe,
or throw away the cigar; long-continued expectoration is
destructive to yourself and revolting to every spectator.

4. Let an interval elapse between the filling of succeeding
pipes.

5. Clean your tube regularly, and your amber mouthpiece with
a feather dipped in spirits of lavender. Never suffer the
conduit to remain discolored or stuffed.

6. A German receiver can be washed out like a teacup, and
the oil collected is of value, but a meerschaum should never
be wetted. A small sponge at the end of a wire dipped in
sweet oil should be used carefully and persistently round
and round, coaxing out any hard concretions, till the inside
be smooth in its dark polished grain, of a rich mahogany
tint. The outside, also, well polished with sweet oil and
stale milk, then enveloped in chamois leather. The rich dark
coloring is the pledge of your safety--better there than
darkening your own brains.

"The pale gold c'noster and Turkey have now given way to the
splendid varieties of America, and my knowledge halts behind
the age. The black sticks resembling lollipops are said to
be compounds of rum, bullocks' blood and tobacco lees. A
taste for them, when once contracted, is abiding. Fine
volatile tobacco, with aromatic delicacy, requires a long
tube; used in a short pipe of modern fashion, they parch and
shrivel the tongue. In short, what is true of all other
pleasures is also true of tobacco-smoking. Fruition is
sometimes too rapid for enjoyment, as the dram-drinker is
less wise than the calm imbiber of the fragrant vintage of
the Garonne. With Burke's common sense I began, and with it
I end. Depurate vice of all her offensiveness, and you prune
her of half her evil. Let not your love of indulgence be so
inordinate as to purchase short pleasure by impairing
health, neglecting duty, or, while promoting your own
self-complacency, allow yourself to become permanently
revolting to society, by offending more senses as well as
more principles than one.'"

Mantegazza, one of the most brilliant of all writers on tobacco, in alluding to the enchantment of the "weed," says:--

"If a winged inhabitant of some remote world felt the
impulse to traverse space, and, with an astronomical map, to
fly round our planetary system, he would at once recognize
the earth by the odor of tobacco which it exhales, forasmuch
as all known nations smoke the nicotian herb. And thousands
and thousands of men, if compelled to limit themselves to a
single nervous aliment, would relinquish wine and coffee,
opium and brandy, and cling fondly to the precious narcotic
leaf. Before Columbus, tobacco was not smoked except in
America; and now, after a lapse of a few centuries in the
furthest part of China and in Japan, in the island of
Oceanica as in Lapland and Siberia, rises from the hut of
the savage and from the palace of the prince, along with the
smoke of the fireplace, where man bakes his bread and warms
his heart, another odorous smoke, which man inhales and
breathes forth again to soothe his pain and to vanquish
fatigue and anxiety.

"In the early times of the introduction of tobacco, smokers
in many countries were condemned to infamous and cruel
punishments; had their noses and their lips cut off, and
with blackened faces and mounted on an ass, exposed to the
coarse jests of the vilest vagabonds and the insults of the
multitude. But now the hangman smokes, and the criminal
condemned to death smokes before being hanged. The king in
his gilt coach smokes; and the assassin smokes who lies in
wait to throw down before the feet of the horses the
murderous bomb. The human family spends every year two
thousand six hundred and seventy millions of francs (about a
hundred millions in English money) on tobacco, which is not
food, which is not drink, and without which it contrived to
live for a long succession of ages.

"In the discomfitures and disasters which befell the Army of
Lavalle, in the civil wars of the Argentine Republic, the
poor fugitives had to suffer the most horrible privations,
which can be imagined. By degrees the tobacco came to an
end, and the Argentines smoked dry leaves. One man, more
fortunate than his comrades, continued to use with much
economy the most precious of all his stores--tobacco. A
fellow soldier begged to be allowed to put the economist's
pipe in his own mouth, and thus to inhale at second-hand the
adored smoke, paying two dollars for the privilege. What is
more striking still, when, in 1843, the convicts in the
prison of Epinal, France, who had for some time been
deprived of tobacco, rose in revolt, their cry was 'tobacco
or death!' When Col. Seybourg was marching in the interior
of Surinam against negro rebels, and the soldiers had to
bear the most awful hardships, they smoked paper, they
chewed leaves and leather, and found the lack of tobacco the
greatest of all their trials and torments."

Elsewhere, inquiring what nervous aliments harmonize the one with the other, he says:--

"The only, the true, the legitimate companion of coffee is
the nicotian plant; and wisely and well the Turkish epicures
declare that for coffee--the drink of Heaven--tobacco is the
salt. The smoke of a puro, of a manilla, or of real Turkish
tobacco, which passes amorously through the voluptuous tip
of amber, blends magnificently with the austere aroma of the
coffee, and the inebriated palate is agitated between a
caress and a rebuke."

From a Southern paper we extract these whimsical lines.
"On the Great
Fall in the Price of Tobacco in 1801," by Hugh Montgomery,
Lynchburgh, Va.,

"Lately a planter chanced to pop
His head into a barber's shop--
Begged to be shaved; it soon was done,
When Strap (inclined oft-times to fun,)
Doubling the price he'd asked before,
Instead of two pence made it four.
The planter said, 'You sure must grant,
Your charge is most exhorbitant.'
'Not so,' quoth Strap, 'I'm right and you are wrong,
For since tobacco fell, your face is twice as long.'"

Another quaint whim in the form of an advertisement for a lost meerschaum is from an Australian paper:

"To Honest men and others,--Driving from Hale Town to
Bridgetown, on Sunday, last, the advertiser lost a cigar
holder with the face of a pretty girl on it. The intrinsic
value of the missing article is small, but as the owner has
been for the last few months converting the young lady from
a blonde into a brunette, he would be glad to get it back
again. If it was picked up by a gentleman, on reading this
notice, he will, of course, send it to the address below. If
it was picked up by a poor man, who could get a few
shillings by selling it, on his bringing it to the address
below, he shall be paid the full amount of its intrinsic
value. If it was picked up by a thief, let him deliver it,
and he shall be paid a like amount, and thus for once can do
an honest action, without being a penny the worse for it."

A humorous writer thus discourses on man, who he denominates as
"common clays":
"Yet we are all common clays! There are long clays and
short clays, coarse clays and refined clays, and the latter
are pretty scarce, that's a fact. To follow out the simile,
life is the tobacco with which we are loaded, and when the
vital spark is applied we live; when that tobacco is
exhausted we die, the essence of our life ascending from the
lukewarm clay when the last fibre burns out, as a curl of
smoke from the ashes in the bowl of the pipe, and mingling
with the perfumed breeze of heaven, or the hot breath
of--well, never mind; we hope not. Then the clay is cold,
and glows no more from the fire within; the pipe is broken,
and ceases to comfort and console. We say, 'A friend has
left us,' or 'Poor old Joe; his pipe is out.' We have all a
certain supply of life, or, if we would pursue the
comparison, a share of tobacco. Some young men smoke too
rapidly, even voraciously, and thus exhaust their share
before their proper time,--then we say they have 'lived too
fast,' or 'pulled at their pipes too hard.' Others, on the
contrary, make their limited supply go a long way, and when
they are taking their last puffs of life's perfumed plant
their energy is unimpaired; they can run a race, walk a mile
with any one, and show few wrinkles upon their brow.

"A delicate person is like a pipe with a crack in the bowl,
for it takes continued and careful pulling to keep his light
in; and to take life is like willfully dashing a lighted
pipe from the mouth into fragments, and scattering the
sparks to the four winds of heaven. An artist is a good
coloring pipe; an attractive orator is a pipe that draws
well; a communist is a foul pipe; a well-educated woman
whose conversation is attractive is a pipe with a nice
mouthpiece; a girl of the period is a fancy pipe, the
ornament of which is liable to chip; a female orator on
woman's rights is invariably a plain pipe; an old toper is a
well-seasoned pipe; an escaped thief is a cutty pipe, and
the policeman in pursuit is a shilling pipe, for is he not a
Bob?"

From these ingenious "conceits" we turn to a few thoughts on the present condition and history of the plant.

The calumet or pipe of peace, decorated with all the splendor of savage taste, is smoked by the red man to ratify good feeling or confirm some treaty of peace. The energetic Yankee bent upon the accomplishment of his ends, puffs vigorously at his cigar and with scarcely a passing notice, strides over obstacles that lie in his path of whatever nature they may be. The dancing Spaniard with his eternal castanets whispers but a word to his dark-eyed senorita as he hands her another perfumed cigarette. The lounging Italian hissing intrigues under the shadow of an ancient portico, smokes on as he stalks over the proud place where the blood of Cæsar dyed the stones of the Capitol, or where the knife of Virginius flashed in the summer sun. The Turk comes forth from the Mosque only to smoke. The priest of Nicaragua with solemn mien strides up the aisle and lights the altar candles with the fire struck from his cigar. The hardy Laplander invites the stranger to his hut and offers him his pipe while he inquires, if he comes from the land of tobacco. The indigent Jakut exchanges his most valuable furs and skins for a few ounces of the "Circassian weed." Its charms are recognized by the gondolier of Venice and the Muleteer of Spain. The Switzer lights his pipe amid Alpine heights. The tourist climbing Ætna, or Vesuvius' rugged side, puffs on though _they_ perchance have long since ceased to smoke. Tobacco, soothed the hardships of Cromwell's soldiers and gave novelty to the court life of the daughters of Louis XIV, delighted the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth and bidding defiance to the ire of her successors, the Stuarts, has never ceased to hold sway over court and camp, as well as over the masses of the people.

In nothing cultivated has there been so remarkable a development. Originally limited to the natives of America, it attracted the attention of Europeans who by cultivation increased the size and quality of the plant. But not alone has the plant improved in form and quality, the rude implements once used by the Indians have given away (even among themselves) to those of improved form and modern style. These facts are without a doubt among the most curious that commerce presents. That a plant primarily used only by savages, should succeed in spite of the greatest opposition in becoming one of the greatest luxuries of the civilized world, is a fact without parallel. It can almost be said, so universally is it used, that its claims are recognized by all. Though hated by kings and popes it was highly esteemed by their subjects. Their delight in the new found novelty was unbounded and doubtless they could sing in praise as Byron did in later times of:

"Sublime tobacco which from East to West
Cheers the tar's labor and the Turkman's rest."