Wits’ Recreations, 1640.

This chapter and the next deal with the history of smoking during the first fifty years after its introduction as a social habit—­roughly to 1630.

The use of tobacco spread with extraordinary rapidity among all classes of society.  During the latter part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and through the early decades of the seventeenth century tobacco-pipes were in full blast.  Tobacco was triumphant.

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about smoking at this period, from the social point of view, was its fashionableness.  One of the marked characteristics of the gallant—­the beau or dandy or “swell” of the time—­was his devotion to tobacco.  Earle says that a gallant was one that was born and shaped for his clothes—­but clothes were only a part of his equipment.  Bishop Hall, satirizing the young man of fashion in 1597, describes the delicacies with which he was accustomed to indulge his appetite, and adds that, having eaten, he “Quaffs a whole tunnel of tobacco smoke”; and old Robert Burton, in satirically enumerating the accomplishments of “a complete, a well-qualified gentleman,” names to “take tobacco with a grace,” with hawking, riding, hunting, card-playing, dicing and the like.  The qualifications for a gallant were described by another writer in 1603 as “to make good faces, to take Tobacco well, to spit well, to laugh like a waiting gentlewoman, to lie well, to blush for nothing, to looke big upon little fellowes, to scoffe with a grace ... and, for a neede, to ride prettie and well.”

A curious feature of tobacco-manners among fashionable smokers of the period was the practice of passing a pipe from one to another, after the fashion of the “loving cup.”  There is a scene in “Greene’s Tu Quoque,” 1614, laid in a fashionable ordinary, where the London gallants meet as usual, and one says to a companion who is smoking:  “Please you to impart your smoke?” “Very willingly, sir,” says the smoker.  Number two takes a whiff or two and courteously says:  “In good faith, a pipe of excellent vapour!” The owner of the pipe then explains that it is “the best the house yields,” whereupon the other immediately depreciates it, saying affectedly:  “Had you it in the house?  I thought it had been your own:  ’tis not so good now as I took it for!” Another writer of this time speaks of one pipe of tobacco sufficing “three or four men at once.”

The rich young gallant carried about with him his tobacco apparatus (often of gold or silver) in the form of tobacco-box, tobacco-tongs—­wherewith to lift a live coal to light his pipe, ladle “for the cold snuffe into the nosthrill,” and priming-iron.  Sometimes the tobacco-box was of ivory; and occasionally a gallant would have looking-glass set in his box, so that when he took it out to obtain tobacco, he could at the same time have a view of his own delectable person.  When our gallant went to dine at the ordinary, according to the custom of the time, he brought out