Snuffers.
In other parts of the country the habit of snuff-taking is confined principally to old ladies, who use any kind, either black or yellow, and who prefer themselves the cheaper kinds. But few varieties are used, and there seems to be but little taste manifested in the selection of the "dust." Foreign varieties are used only to a limited extent, being chiefly confined to those of transatlantic birth and tastes. The custom of chewing and smoking seems to be more popular with the male sex than snuff-taking, and one rarely finds a man addicted to the latter habit, unless it be one somewhat advanced in years.
Stewart in his admirable paper on snuff gives much useful information in regard to the universal custom of using it as well as its origin and distinguished uses of the great sternutatory.
"The luckless fate of inventors and originators has become proverbial, but the ingenious individual whose nostrils rejoiced in the first pinch of snuff stood in no need of the niggardly praise of contemporaries or the lavish gratitude of posterity. That first 'pinch' was its own priceless reward, far above present appreciation or future fame. What matters it, that his great name has not been reverently handed down to us: that posterity seeks in vain his honored tomb, on which to hang her grateful votive wreath; that zealous antiquaries have raised up innumerable pretenders to his unclaimed honors, and striven to rob him of his fame? Enough for that lucky inventor, wherever he may rest, that he enjoyed in his lifetime the reward for which ordinary benefactors of their kind are fain to look to the future.
"It is perfectly vain to attempt now to penetrate into the mystery which envelopes the name and nation of the first snuff-taker: long before rough, noble-hearted Drake cured his dyspepsia by the use of tobacco, or Raleigh transplanted some roots of that precious weed into English soil, there were European noses which had rejoiced at its pulverized leaves. Conjecture, lost in the mazy distance, gladly lays hold of something substantial in the shape of snuff's first royal patron. This was Catherine de Medicis, who, receiving some seeds of the tobacco plant from a Dutch colony, cherished them, and elevated the dried and pounded leaves into a royal medicine, with the proud title of 'Herbe à la Reine.' For in the beginning men took snuff, not as an everyday luxury, but as a medicament. Like tea—which a hundred years later was advertised as a cure for every ill—the new sneezing powder was hailed a universal specific; and so pleasant in its operation, that mankind, acting upon the wholesome aphorism that prevention is much better than cure, and eagerly anticipated the disease it was supposed to remedy."
"The use of 'the pungent grains of titillating dust' received a somewhat heavy and discouraging blow from an unexpected quarter. That ubiquitous power which hurled anathemas alike at the heresies of Luther and the length of clerical wigs, discountenanced its use, and at length fairly lost its temper in the contest with snuff. Whether from a prescience of the beneficial influence it was destined to exert upon mankind, or from a suspicion of its power of sharpening intellects, it is difficult to say; but Popes Urban VIII., and Innocent waged quite a miniature crusade against snuff, anathematizing those who should use it in any church, and positively threatening with excommunication all impious persons who should provoke a profane sneeze within the sacred precincts of St. Peter's pile; Louis XIV., that good son of the Church, filially complied with the paternal injunction, but his courtiers were less yielding; and the ante-chamber of Versailles frequently resounded with the effects of the pleasant stimulant.
"All persecution has a distinct tendency to establish the object of its hate, and so it was with the subject of our article—it only required to be loved; and I do not doubt that, had circumstances required them, snuff would have found its martyrs. Its use was not general in England until Charles II. introduced it, upon his return from exile, with other important fashions. It had been known and used before, as had the periwig, but it was not until his reign that it became common. When the Stuarts relieved the country of their presence for the second and last time, it had become firmly established; and, by the days of good Queen Anne, was such a necessary of life, that there were in the metropolis alone no less than seven thousand shops where the snuff-boxes of the Londoners could be replenished.
"At that time, indeed, gallants were as proud of their jewelled boxes of amber, porcelain, ebony and agate as they were of their flowing wigs and clouded canes, the handles of which were not unfrequently constructed to hold the cherished dust. We are told by courtly Dick Steel, that a handsome snuff-box was as much an essential of 'the fine gentleman' as his gilt chariot, diamond ring, and brocade sword-knot. We know them to have been manufactured of the costliest material, heavy with gold and brilliant with jewels, as they needed to be when their masters carried wigs 'high on the shoulder in a basket borne,' worth forty or fifty guineas, and wore enough Flanders lace upon their persons to have stocked a milliner's stall in New England.
"Unfortunately, but very naturally, this extravagance rendered snuff a butt for the wits (who all took it, by the way), to shoot at. Steele, whose weakness for dress and show were proverbial, levelled many of his blunt shafts at its use; and Pope, who himself tells us 'of his wig all powder and all snuff his band,' let fly one of his keener arrows at the beaux, whose wit lay in their snuff-boxes and tweezer cases. As the men laid by, in the Georgian era, much of the magnificence of their attire, so their snuff-boxes became plainer and decidedly uglier. Rushing into an opposite extreme, the most outrageous receptacles for the precious dust were devised. Boxes in the shape of bibles, boots, shoes, toads, and coffins outraged public taste. The strangest materials were used in their construction; the public taste leaning towards relics possessing historical interest. Thus the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare, the hull of the Royal George, in which 'brave Kempenfelt went down, with twice four hundred men,' and the deck of the Victory, on which Nelson died 'for England, home, and beauty,' have alone been supposed to supply material for snuff-boxes to an extent which, if known, must considerably weaken the faith of their possessors in their genuineness.