The Port Gibson reveille., 1916-06-08
Then you'll find some
savory whifs Of fact in
this article Social history
Of the divine weed"

49, ial vapor which curls uI
ward from their pipes ant
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, G. 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 so years the smoking of pipes
not only became general among all
classes, but thing of highest fashion,
held in the light of an art. In those
days it was not said that man smoked
tobacco, but that he drank or
sucked" tobacco; and the smoker
was called a 'tobacconist." The gal
liant of those days had no hesitation
about smoking in the presence Of
women, and a character in Chapman's s
play, "All Fools" praises himself as
different from others:
And for discourse in my fair mis-
tress' presence.
did not, as your barren gallants do,
Fill my discourses up drinking tobac-
CO."
One of the strangest things about
Shakespeare's works, says the author,
is the fact that nowhere does he men
tion the word tobacco. The conclu-
sion is drawn that Shakespeare did
not smoke. His contemporaries, Spen-
Ger and Ben Jonson are different
Spencer invoked the plant as "Sov-
eraigne weede, divine tobacco" and
from Jonson's comedies can be gath
cred a perfect compendium of to
bacco drinking" as one of the most
important social phenomena of the
age. He reveals that a singular fea-
ture Of the enthusiasm for tobacco
in the early years of the seventeenth
century was the existence of pro
fessors of the art" Of smoking.
The tobacco sellers were mostly
apothecaries and some of these took
pupils and taught them the Sights,
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' 81 Every Man Out of His HUI
moi" up a bill in st. Pauls in
which he offers to teach any young
gentleman newly come into his in
heritance ito entertain the most gen
tlemanlike 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 cOroflary and practice of |
the Cuban ebolition, euripus and Whit, |
which he shall receive, or take in here
at London and evaporate at Uxbridge, !
or farther, if it please him"
I Taking the Whit" says the author,
may have been either a swallowing |
OF the smoke, or 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 instruc-
tors in smoking professed to be able
to teach the secret of emitting smoke
not only from the nose but from the
ears; but healthy skepticism is per-
mitted 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
upon observing which some of
the earl of Leiscester's faction whis-
pered that Sir Walter had certainly
poisoned her. But her majesty, in a
short while recovering, made the coun-
tess of Nottingham and all her maids
smoke whole pipe out among them"
The queen evidently had no desire
to monopolize the novel sensation
caused by smoking. An old writer,
in Life of Raleigh" says that tobac-
co 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 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 sylvia,
queen of Roumania, the Dow
ager Tzarina of Russia, the late EN- /