luncheon-baskets with a well-filled pipe, to be smoked at school, under the directing eye of the master.  In 1703, Lawrence Spooner wrote that “the sin of the kingdom in the intemperate use of tobacco swelleth and increaseth so daily that I can compare it to nothing but the waters of Noah, that swelled fifteen cubits above the highest mountains.”  The deluge reached its height in England—­so thinks the amusing and indefatigable Mr. Fairholt, author of “Tobacco and its Associations”—­in the reign of Queen Anne.  Steele, in the “Spectator,” (1711,) describes the snuff-box as a rival to the fan among ladies; and Goldsmith pictures the belles at Bath as entering the water in full bathing costume, each provided with a small floating basket, to hold a snuff-box, a kerchief, and a nosegay.  And finally, in 1797, Dr. Clarke complains of the handing about of the snuff-box in churches during worship, “to the great scandal of religious people,”—­adding, that kneeling in prayer was prevented by the large quantity of saliva ejected in all directions.  In view of such formidable statements as these, it is hardly possible to believe that the present generation surpasses or even equals the past in the consumption of tobacco.

And all this sudden popularity was in spite of a vast persecution which sought to unite all Europe against this indulgence, in the seventeenth century.  In Russia, its use was punishable with amputation of the nose; in Berne, it ranked next to adultery among offences; Sandys, the traveller, saw a Turk led through the streets of Constantinople mounted backward on an ass with a tobacco-pipe thrust through his nose.  Pope Urban VIII., in 1624, excommunicated those who should use it in churches, and Innocent XII., in 1690, echoed the same anathema.  Yet within a few years afterwards travellers reported that same free use of snuff in Romish worship which still astonishes spectators.  To see a priest, during the momentous ceremonial of High Mass, enliven the occasion by a voluptuous pinch, is a sight even more astonishing, though perhaps less disagreeable, than the well-used spittoon which decorates so many Protestant pulpits.

But the Protestant pulpits did their full share in fighting the habit, for a time at least.  Among the Puritans, no man could use tobacco publicly, on penalty of a fine of two and sixpence, or in a private dwelling, if strangers were present; and no two could use it together.  That iron pipe of Miles Standish, still preserved at Plymouth, must have been smoked in solitude or not at all.  This strictness was gradually relaxed, however, as the clergy took up the habit of smoking; and I have seen an old painting, on the panels of an ancient parsonage in Newburyport, representing a jovial circle of portly divines sitting pipe in hand around a table, with the Latin motto, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.”  Apparently the tobacco was one of the essentials, since there was unity respecting