In the Wallace Collection at Hertford House is a pouch or case labelled as having belonged to and been used by Sir Walter Raleigh.  This pouch contains several clay pipes.  It was perhaps this same pouch or case which once upon a time figured in Ralph Thoresby’s museum at Leeds, and is described by Thoresby himself in his “Ducatus Leodiensis,” 1715.  Curiously enough, a few years ago when excavations were being made around the foundations of Raleigh’s house at Youghal a clay pipe-bowl was dug up which in size, shape, &c., was exactly like the pipes in the Wallace exhibit.  Raleigh lived and no doubt smoked in the Youghal house, so it is quite possible that the bowl found belonged to one of the pipes actually smoked by him.  In the garden of the Youghal house, by the way, they used to show the tree—­perhaps still do so—­under which Raleigh was sitting, smoking his pipe, when his servant drenched him.  Thus the tradition, which, as we have seen, dates from 1708 only, has obtained two local habitations—­Youghal and Durham House on the Adelphi site.

In November 1911 a curiously shaped pipe was put up for sale in Mr. J.C.  Stevens’s Auction Room, Covent Garden, which was described as that which Raleigh smoked “on the scaffold.”  The pipe in question was said to have been given by the doomed man to Bishop Andrewes, in whose family it remained for many years, and it was stated to have been in the family of the owner, who sent it for sale, for some 200 years.  The pipe was of wood constructed in four pieces of strange shape, rudely carved with dogs’ heads and faces of Red Indians.  According to legend it had been presented to Raleigh by the Indians.  The auctioneer, Mr. Stevens, remarked that unfortunately a parchment document about the pipe was lost some years ago, and declared, “If we could only produce the parchment the pipe would fetch L500.”  In the end, however, it was knocked down at seventy-five guineas.

The form and make of the first pipe is a matter I do not propose to go into here; but in connexion with the first pipe smoked in this country Aubrey’s interesting statements must be given.  Writing in the time of Charles II, he said that he had heard his grandfather say that at first one pipe was handed from man to man round about the table.  “They had first silver pipes; the ordinary sort made use of a walnut shell and a straw”—­surely a very unsatisfactory pipe.  Tobacco in those earliest days, he says, was sold for its weight in silver.  “I have heard some of our old yeomen neighbours say that when they went to Malmesbury or Chippenham Market, they culled out their biggest shillings to lay in the scales against the tobacco.”

II

TOBACCO TRIUMPHANT:  SMOKING FASHIONABLE AND UNIVERSAL

    Tobacco engages
    Both sexes, all ages,
      The poor as well as the wealthy;
    From the court to the cottage,
    From childhood to dotage,
      Both those that are sick and the healthy.