schools and professors established here for the purpose of teaching the mystery of smoking, on the first introduction of the Virginian weed, and the mode of exspifflicating the smoke out of one's mouth is at present, as it were, a Shibboleth demonstrative of an English gentleman." This momentous query I cannot determine; but being myself moderately addicted to the occasional "taking of fumes by pipes to dry and comfort," as the sage of Verulam hath it, I should not be sorry to have the question resolved in the affirmative,—I should not be sorry, moreover, to know that, like Tom Campbell, he imbibed the Nicotian solace through what the "Doctor" somewhat irreverently terms the "impure channel" of a halfpenny pipe. This is a primitive and time-honoured method, while the cigarro is a modern and coxcombical innovation. I am acquainted with the various forms of "drinking tobacco," as our forefathers termed the process, and speak not unadvisedly. I have smoked Kanaster at Berlin in the capacious porcelain bowl of the German student, and in the mighty meer-schaum of the Viennese; I have inhaled caporal through a brûle-gueule in a Parisian mansarde; I am moderately familiar with the ostentatious nargeeleh of the Persians, the hookah of the Turks, the simpler cutty-pipe of the Scotch, the dudheen of the Irish, and the briar-root of everybody,—cum multis aliis,—and solemnly declare, as the result of my experience, that nothing, in point of economy, elegance and convenience, excels the "Broseley straw," or " Churchwarden," of English manufacture:—
"Little tube of mighty power,
Charmer of an idle hour,
......
Lip of wax, and eye of fire;"
as Isaac Hawkins Browne has it, among his fine imitations. It was while manipulating such an instrument,—for it is marvellous how little it has changed in form since the introduction of tobacco,—that Raleigh or Tarlton (the story is told of both) was inundated with water by his servant, aghast at the unwonted incandescence of his master. It was the right thing in Shakespeare's time for your brave gallant to smoke his "clay" upon the very stage (how odd it is that the great bard makes no mention of Tobacco,—Ben Jonson is full of allusions to it!), and there he sat:—
" attended by his page,
That only serves to fill those pipes with smoke
For which he pawned hath his riding cloak."[1]
Pope allots to
"History her pot, Theology her pipe,"
and truth to say, the parsons have rivalled the poets in their devotion to the herb of Santa Croce,—"divine Tobacco," as Spenser has it. It is fine to think of Robert Hall lighting his Broseley at the pulpit-lamps at the close of his sermon, and of Samuel Parr half hidden by fuliginous clouds, a yard or so behind the bowl of a huge "churchwarden." It is fine, too, to think of Charles Lamb,—as he was wont to think of Charles Cotton, in that delectable chamber, "piscatoribus sacrum,"—of Hobbes, and Barrow, and Aldrich, and Newton, and Milton, and the host of glorious intelligences who have delighted in a pipe; and we are thankful
- ↑ Springes to Catch Woodcocks. By Henry Parrot, 1613.
