Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 139, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 June 1916 — DO YOU SMOKE TOBACCO? [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

DO YOU SMOKE TOBACCO?

Then you’ll find some savory whiffs of fact in this article—Social history of the “divine weed’’

7 _ rryi ANY axe the dreams which I | wooers of Lady Nicotine have seen floating in the genial vapor which curls upward from their pipes and cigars, says the St.. Louis Post-Dis-patch; but none of them could have more fascination than the quaint and curious lore upon the subject of the weed which has been compiled by an English writer, Q. L. Apperson, and published under the inviting title of “The Social History of Smoking.” Everyone knows that tobacco was one of the gifts of the New World to the Old, and that Sir Walter Raleigh made smoking fashionable in England in the days of Queen Elizabeth. For the next 50 years the smoking of pipes not only became general among all classes, but a thing of highest fashion, held in the light of an art. In those days it was not said that a man smoked tobacco, but that he “drank” or “sucked” tobacco; and the smoker was called a “tobacconist.” The gallant of those days had no hesitation about smoking in the presence of women, and a character in Chapman s play, “All Fools,” praises himself as different from others: “And for discourse in my fair mistress’ presence. I did not, as your barren gallants do, Fill my discourses up drinking tobacco.”

One of the Btrangest things about Shakespeare's works, says the author, is the fact that nowhere does he mention the word tobacco. The conclusion is drawn that Shakespeare did not smoke. His contemporaries, Spencer and Ben Jonson are different. Spencer invoked the plant as “Soveraigne weede, divine tobacco,” and from Jonson's comedies can be gathered a perfect compendium of “tobacco drinking” as one of the most important social phenomena of the age. He reveals that a singular feature of the enthusiasm for tobacco in the early years of the seventeenth century was the existence of “professors of the art” of smoking. The tobacco sellers were mostly apothecaries and some of these took pupils and taught them the “slights, as tricks with the pipe were called. These included inhaling, and sending out the smoke in globes, rings, and so forth. Shift, a professor of the art in Jonson’s “Every Man Out of His Humor,” puts up a bill in St. Paul’s in which he offers to teach any young gentleman newly come into his inheritance “to entertain the most gentlemanlike use of tobacco, as first, to give it the most exquisite perfume; then to know all the delicate sweet forms for the assumption of it; as also the rare corollary and practice of the Cuban ebolition, euripus and whiff, which he shall receive, or fake in here at London and evaporate at Uxbridge, or farther, if it please him.” ’"Taking the whiff,” says the author, “may have been either a swallowing of the smoke, or a retaining it In the throat for a given space of time; but what he meant by ‘Cuban ebolition’ or ‘euripus’ is perhaps best left to the imagination.” If one contemporary writer may be believed, some of these early instructors in smoking professed to be able to teach the secret of emitting smoke not only from the nose but from the ears; but a healthy skepticism is permitted here. There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked—with unpleasant results. Campbell, in his “History of Virginia,” says that Raleigh having offered her majesty some tobacco to smoke, "after two or three whiffs she was seized with nausea, upon observing which some of the earl of Leicester's faction whispered that Sir Walter had certainly poisoned her. But her majesty, in a short while recovering, made the countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe out among them.” The queen evidently had no desire to monopolize the novel sensation caused by smoking. An old writer. In a “Life of Raleigh,” says that tobacco “soon became of such vogue in Queen Elizabeth's court that some of the great ladies, as well as noblemen therein would not scruple sometimes to take a pipe very sociably.” Many royal ladies of our time have had the reputation of being confirmed smokers, says Apperson. Among them may be mentioned Carmen Sylva, dowager queen of Roumania, the Dowager Tzarina of Russia, the late Em-

press Elizabeth of Austria, King Alphonso’s mother, formerly quean regent of Spain; the Dowager Queen Margherita of Italy, and former Queen Amelia of Portugal. It is, of course, well known that Austrian and Russian women generally are fond of cigarette smoking. On Russian railways it is not unusual to find a compartment labeled: “For women who do not smoke.” Queen Victoria, who detested tobacco and banished it from her abodes as far as she could, once received a present of pipes and tobaccos. She had sent to the king of Dahomey a basket tent, a silver pipe and two silver trays. That dusky old reprobate replied that he hoped the next gifts would include a carriage and pair and a white woman, both of which he would appreciate very much; but sent in return some native pipes and tobacco for the queen to smoke.

A curious feature of tobacco manners among fashionable smokers of the Elizabethan period was the practice of passing the pipe from one to another, after thd fashion of a loving cup. In a play of 1614, one London, gallant says to another who is smoking: “Please you to impart your tmoke?” “Very willingly, sir,” says the smoker. Number two takes a whiff or so and courteously says: “In good faith, a pipe of excellent vapor!” The rich young swell carried about with him an elaborate tobacco apparatus, often of gold or silver. It included a tobacco box, tongs with which to lift a live coal to light his pipe, a ladle “for the cold snuffle into the nosthrill,” a priming iron and as large a collection of pipes as his means could afford and his pockets could And room for. Sometimes the tobacco box was of ivory, and occasionally a looking glass was set in the lid, so that when the beau opened it to take out tobacco, he could also have a view of his delectable person. However, tobacco had many enemies, and of these the most influential was Queen Elizabeth’s successor, Janqes I, author of the famous “Counterblasts to Tobacco.” One of his most restrained denunciations of “tobacco drinking” was this: “A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resein--bling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.” Through the royal example of James and of his son, Charles I, smoking gradually sank into a decline insofar as It was a fashionable practice, which continued until well Into the last century. Thence arose the curious fact that the pleasure-loving cavaliers were not smokers, while the Puritans, sour as was their hatred of nearly every joy, were mighty “drinkers of the weed.” The finds of pipes on the sites of the camps of the parliamentary armies have been numerous. It is not known whether Cromwell smoked; but Milton smoked a pipe at 9 p. m. every day before retiring. However, in some cases the Puritans contrived to introduce their religion even into pipesmoking, for an old chronicler tells of a Presbyterian minister so precise that “he would not so much as take a pipe of tobacco before that he had first sayed grace over it.”

But the Puritan colonists in New England were more strict. The famous Connecticut “Blue Laws forbade anyone under the age of twentyone to smoke, and no one of any age could smoke without a license from the court and a physician’s certificate that tobacco would be useful for him. Under the restoration smoking became unfashionable, the pipe being ousted from the stylish world by the snuff box, although it still continued universally popular among humbler folk. Smoking was regarded as “low” or provincial until well into the reign of Queen Victoria. When the prince regent died in 1830, he left not a cellar of wine but a “cellar of snuff, which was sold to a tobacconist for $20,000. Lord Petersham, famous among dandies, made a wonderful collection of snuffs and snuff boxes, and was fastidious in his choice of a box to carry. Once when a light Sevres snuff box which Lord Petersham was using* was admired, the noble owner replied, with a gentle lisp: “Yes, it is a nice summer box —but would certainly be inappropriate for- winter wear.” The revival of smoking in the fashionable world, where tobacco had so long been in bad odor except in the form of snuff, was due to the introduction of the cigar, imported into England from Spain and the Spanish colonies. British officers possibly brought the cigar back with them from the peninsular wars. * Only a few of the daring persons ventured to adopt the cigar at first, and between 1824 and 1830 there was only a wretched smoking room at the Athenaeum club in London, Doctor Hawtree, on behalf of the house committee, announcing that “no gentleman smokes.” To add further odious touch to his hideous dwarf, Quilip, Dickens made him a cigar smoker; Lord Rawdon, in “Vanity Fair,” was significantly a smoker of cigars.

However, in the bohemian set, including authors and poets, smoking was common. Carlyle was a great smoker, and the story is familiar that one evening he and Tennyson sat for hours in solemn silence smoking their pipes, one on each side of the fireplace; and that, as the visitor arose to go, Carlyle, bidding him good-night, said: “Man, Alfred, we hae had a graund nicht; co*e again soon.” In tbo course of a trip to Italy with friends, Tennyson found he could not obtain his favorite brand of tobacco, packed up his portmanteau and returned home, breaking up the party. Charles Lamb remarked that he hoped his last breath would be inhaled through a pipe and exhaled in a pun. The cigar was aided in reviving the habit by the introduction of the first wooden pipes in England in 1859, and the first cigarettes in about 1860. These seem astonishingly recent dates, but the author vouches for both. The word “briar” has no connection with the prickly thorny briar of England, but is derived from the French term, “bruyere,” meaning the white heath plant from the roots of which the pipes are made. Laurence Oliphant, a man both of letters and fashion, is generally credited -with having first introduced cigarettes into English society. They became fashionable in about 1870, and had a revolutionary effect on smoking among women. Those of the lower classes had frequently been pipe smokers, but. in society the ladies, perhaps for physical reasons, never took up either pipe or cigar to any extent. The cigarettes offered them a milder anjl more delicate means of sharing man’s delight in the weed. “In the twentieth century," the author says, “tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of 300 years is complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking has never been so smiled upon by fashion as it is at the present time.”