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. _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."