III

TOBACCO TRIUMPHANT (continued)—­SELLERS OF TOBACCO AND PROFESSORS OF SMOKING—­ABUSE AND PRAISE OF TOBACCO

    This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow;
    He lets me have good tobacco.

          BEN JONSON, The Alchemist.

The druggists and other tradesmen who sold tobacco in Elizabethan and Jacobean days had every provision for the convenience of their numerous customers.  Some so-called druggists, it may be shrewdly suspected, did much more business in tobacco than they did in drugs.  Dekker tells us of an apothecary and his wife who had no customers resorting to their shop “for any phisicall stuffe,” but whose shop had many frequenters in the shape of gentlemen who “came to take their pipes of the divine smoake.”  That tobacco was often the most profitable part of a druggist’s stock is also clear from the last sentence in Bishop Earle’s character of “A Tobacco-Seller,” one of the shortest in that remarkable collection of “Characters” which the Bishop issued in 1628 under the title of “Micro-Cosmographie.”

“A Tobacco-Seller,” says Earle, “is the onely man that findes good in it which others brag of, but do not; for it is meate, drinke, and clothes to him.  No man opens his ware with greater seriousnesse, or challenges your judgement more in the approbation.  His shop is the Randevous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses, and their communication is smoake.  It is the place onely where Spaine is commended, and prefer’d before England itselfe.  He should be well experienc’d in the world:  for he ha’s daily tryall of mens nostrils, and none is better acquainted with humors.  Hee is the piecing commonly of some other trade which is bawde to his Tobacco, and that to his wife, which is the flame that follows this smoke.”

This brief “Character” is hardly so pointed or so effective as some of the others in the “Micro-Cosmographie,” but it would seem that the Bishop was not very friendly to tobacco.  In the character of “A Drunkard” he says:  “Tobacco serves to aire him after a washing [i.e. a drinking-bout], and is his onely breath, and breathing while.”  In another, a tavern “is the common consumption of the Afternoone, and the murderer, or maker away of a rainy day.  It is the Torrid Zone that scorches the face, and Tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up.”

The druggist-tobacconists were well stocked with abundance of pipes—­those known as Winchester pipes were highly popular—­with maple blocks for cutting or shredding the tobacco upon, juniper wood charcoal fires, and silver tongs with which the hot charcoal could be lifted to light the customer’s pipe.  The maple block was in constant use in those days, when the many present forms of prepared tobacco and varied mixtures were unknown.  In Middleton and Dekker’s “Roaring Girl,” 1611, the “mincing and shredding of tobacco” is mentioned; and in the same play, by the way, we are told that “a pipe of rich smoak” was sold for sixpence.