Tobacco’s a musician,
    And in a pipe delighteth,
      It descends in a close
      Through the organ of the nose
    With a relish that inviteth.

These are merely a few examples of both the praise and the abuse which were lavished upon tobacco at this early stage in the history of smoking.  It would be easy to fill many pages with the like testimonials and denunciations, especially the latter, from writers of the early decades of the seventeenth century.  Perhaps the most curious thing in connexion with the immense number of allusions to smoking in the literature of the period is that there is no mention whatever of tobacco or smoking in the plays of William Shakespeare.  As Edmund Spenser, in the “Faerie Queene,” speaks of

      The soveraine weede, divine tobacco,

it may be presumed that he was a smoker.

IV

CAVALIER AND ROUNDHEAD SMOKERS

“A custom lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.”—­JAMES I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco.

The social history of smoking from the point of view of fashion, during the period covered by this and the next two chapters may be summarized in a sentence.  Through the middle of the seventeenth century smoking maintained its hold upon all classes of society, but in the later decades there are distinct signs that the habit was becoming less universal; and it seems pretty clear that by the time of Queen Anne, smoking, though still extensively practised in many classes of society, was to a considerable extent out of vogue among those most amenable to the dictates of Fashion.

It is certain that the armies of the Parliament were great smokers, for the finds of seventeenth-century pipes on the sites of their camps have been numerous.  A considerable number of pipes of the Caroline period, with the usual small elongated bowls, were found in 1902 at Chichester, in the course of excavating the foundations of the Old Swan Inn, East Street, for building the present branch of the London and County Bank.

We know also that the Roundhead soldiers smoked in circumstances that did them no credit.  In the account of the trial of Charles I, written by Dr. George Bates, principal physician to his Majesty, and to Charles II also, we read that when the sentence of the Court presided over by Bradshaw, condemning the King “to death by severing his Head from his Body,” had been read, the soldiers treated the fallen monarch with great indignity and barbarity.  They spat on his clothes as he passed by, and even in his face; and they “blew the smoak of Tobacco, a thing which they knew his Majesty hated, in his sacred mouth, throwing their broken Pipes in his way as he passed along.”