one a good stomach; it is agreeable with mirth or sadness, with feasting and with fasting; it will make one rest that wants sleep, and will keep one waking that is drowsie; it hath an offensive smell to some, and is more desirable than any perfume to others; that it is a most excellent preservative, both experience and reason do teach; it corrects the air by Fumigation, and it avoids corrupt humours by Salivation; for when one takes it either by Chewing it in the leaf, or Smoaking it in the pipe, the humors are drawn and brought from all parts of the body, to the stomach, and from thence rising up to the mouth of the Tobacconist, as to the helme of a Sublimatory, are voided and spitten out.”

When plague was abroad even children were compelled to smoke.  At the time of the dreadful visitation of 1665 all the boys at Eton were obliged to smoke in school every morning.  One of these juvenile smokers, a certain Tom Rogers, years afterwards declared to Hearne, the Oxford antiquary, that he never was whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking.  Times have changed at Eton since this anti-tobacconist martyr received his whipping.  It is sometimes stated that at this time smoking was generally practised in schools, and that at a stated hour each morning lessons were laid aside, and masters and scholars alike produced their pipes and proceeded to smoke tobacco.  But I know of no authority for this wider statement; it seems to have grown out of Hearne’s record of the practice at Eton.

The belief in the prophylactic power of tobacco was, however, very generally held.  When Mr. Samuel Pepys on June 7, 1665, for the first time saw several houses marked with the ominous red cross, and the words “Lord, have mercy upon us” chalked upon the doors, he felt so ill at ease that he was obliged to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew.  There is nothing to show that Pepys even smoked, which considering his proficiency in the arts of good-fellowship, is perhaps a little surprising.  Defoe, in his fictitious but graphic “Journal of the Plague Year in London,” says that the sexton of one of the London parishes, who personally handled a large number of the victims, never had the distemper at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and was sexton of the parish to the time of his death.  This man, according to Defoe, “never used any preservative against the infection other than holding garlic and rue in his mouth, and smoking tobacco.”

When excavations were in progress early in 1901, preparatory to the construction of Kingsway and Aldwych, they included the removal of bodies from the burying-grounds of St. Clement Danes and St. Mary-le-Strand; and among the bones were found a couple of the curious tobacco-pipes called “plague-pipes,” because they are supposed to have been used as a protection against infection by those whose office it was to bury the dead.  These pipes have been dug up from time to time in numbers so large that one antiquary, Mr. H. Syer Cuming, has ventured to infer that “almost every person who ventured from home invoked the protection of tobacco.”