The Social History of SmokingApperson, George Latimer
History
The Social History of Smoking
Apperson, George Latimer
Smoking
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 these possessions, and smoked
while the dinner was being served. Before dinner, after taking a few
turns up and down Paul's Walk in the old cathedral, he might look into
the booksellers' shops, and, pipe in mouth, inquire for the most
recent attack upon the "divine weed"--the contemporary tobacco
literature was abundant--or drop into an apothecary's, which was
usually a tobacco-shop also, and there meet his fellow-smokers.
In the afternoon the gallant might attend what Dekker calls a
"Tobacco-ordinary," by which may possibly have been meant a
smoking-club, or, more probably, the gathering after dinner at one of
the many ordinaries in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's Cathedral of
"tobacconists," as smokers were then called, to discuss the merits of
their respective pipes, and of the various kinds of tobacco--"whether
your Cane or your Pudding be sweetest."
Of course he often bragged, like Julio in Day's "Law Trickes":
"Tobacco? the best in Europe, 't cost me ten Crownes an ounce, by this
vapour."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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