In England, tobacco taking soon became a favorite custom not only with the loiterers about taverns and other public places, but among the courtiers of Elizabeth. Smoking was called drinking tobacco, as the fashionable method was to "put it through the nose" or exhale it through the nostrils. At this period tobacco seemed to have nearly the same effect as it did upon the Indian, producing a sort of intoxication; thus in "The Perfuming of Tobacco" (1611) it is said:
"The smoke of tobacco drunke or drawen by a pipe, filleth the membranes of the braine, and astonisheth and filleth many persons with such joy and pleasure, and sweet losse of senses, that they can by no means be without it."
The term "drinking tobacco" was not confined to England, but was used in Holland, France, Spain and Portugal, as the same method of blowing the smoke through the nostrils, seemed to be everywhere in vogue.
The use of tobacco increased very rapidly soon after its importation from Virginia. The Spaniards and Portuguese had hitherto monopolized the trade, so that it brought enormous prices, some kinds selling for its weight in silver. As soon as its culture commenced in Virginia the demand for West India tobacco lessened and Virginia leaf soon came into favor, owing not more to the lowering of price than to the quality of the leaf.[38] This was about 1620, which some writers have called the golden age of tobacco. It had now become a prime favorite and was used by nearly all classes. Poets and dramatists sung its praises, while others wrote of its wonderful medicinal qualities.[39] Fops and knaves alike indulged in its use.
"About the latter end of the sixteenth century, tobacco was in great vogue in London, with wits and 'gallants,' as the dandies of that age were called. To wear a pair of velvet breeches, with panes or slashes of silk, an enormous starched ruff, a gilt handled sword, and a Spanish dagger; to play at cards or dice in the chambers of the groom-porter, and smoke tobacco in the tilt-yard or at the play-house, were then the grand characteristics of a man of fashion. Tobacconists' shops were then common; and as the article, which appears to have been sold at a high price, was indispensable to the gay 'man about town,' he generally endeavored to keep his credit good with his tobacco-merchant. Poets and pamphleteers laughed at the custom, though generally they seem to have no particular aversion to an occasional treat to a sober pipe and a poute of sack. Your men of war, who had served in the Low Countries, and who taught young gallants the noble art of fencing, were particularly fond of tobacco; and your gentlemen adventurers, who had served in a buccaneering expedition against the Spaniards, were no less partial to it. Sailors—from the captain to the ship-boy—all affected to smoke, as if the practice was necessary to their character; and to 'take tobacco' and wear a silver whistle, like a modern boatswain's mate, was the pride of a man-of-war's man.
"Ben Jonson, of all our early dramatic writers, most frequently alludes to the practice of smoking. In his play of 'Every Man in his Humour,' first acted in 1598, Captain Bobadil thus extols in his own peculiar vein the virtues of tobacco; while Cob, the water carrier, with about equal truth, relates some startling instances of its pernicious effects.
"'Bobadil. Body o' me, here's the remainder of seven pound since yesterday was seven-night! 'Tis your right Trinadado! Did you never take any, Master Stephen?
"'Stephen. No, truly, Sir; but I'll learn to take it since you commend it so.
"'Bobadil. Sir, believe me upon my relation,—for what I tell you the world shall not reprove. I have been in the Indies where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only. Therefore, it cannot be but 'tis most divine. Further, take it, in the true kind, so, it makes an antidote, that had you taken the most deadly poisonous plant in all Italy, it should expel it and clarify you with as much ease as I speak. And for your greenwound, your balsamum, and your St. John's-wort, are all mere gulleries and trash to it, especially your Trinidado: your Nicotian is good too. I could say what I know of it for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours, crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this kind, but I profess myself no quack-salver: only thus much, by Hercules; I do hold it, and will affirm it before any prince in Europe, to be the most sovereign and precious weed that ever the earth tendered to the use of man.'
Cob. "'By gad's me, I mar'l what pleasure or felicity they have in taking this roguish tobacco! It's good for nothing but to choke a man and fill him full of smoke and embers. There were four died out of one house last week with taking of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight; one of them, they say, will ne'er 'scape it: he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward and downward. By the stocks! an' there were no wiser men than I, I'd have it present whipping, man or woman that should but deal with a tobacco-pipe; why, it will stifle them all in the end, as many as use it; it's little better than rats-bane or rosaker.'"[40]