The Faithful Attendant.
Tobacco smoking, however, can boast of many patrons besides warriors, physicians and statesmen, some of the finest writers of the last three centuries have indulged in the weed. The following extract from the "Australasian" entitled, "Tobacco Smoking" refers to many literary smokers.
"Burke felt himself precluded from 'drawing an indictment against a whole community.' The critical moralist pauses before the formidable array of the entire social world, civilized and savage. The Cockney, leaving behind him the regalias and meerschaums of the Strand, finds the wax-tipped clay-pipe in the parlors of Yorkshire: finds dhudeen and cutty in the wilds of Galway and on the rugged shores of Skye and Mull. The Frenchman he finds enveloped in clouds of Virginia, and the Swede, Dane, and Norwegian, of every grade or class, makes the pipe his travelling companion and his domestic solace. The Magyar, the Pole and the Russian rival the Englishman in gusto, perhaps excel him in refinement; the Dutch boor smokes finer Tobacco than many English gentlemen can command, and more of it than many of our hardened votaries could endure; but all must yield, or rather, all must accumulate, ere our conceptions can approach to the German. America and the British colonies round off the picture, adding Cherokees, Redmen and Mongolians ad libitum. The Jew whether in Hounds ditch, Paris Hamburgh, or Constantinople, ever inhales the choicest growths, and the Mussulman's 'keyf' is proverbial. India and Persia dispute with us the palm of refinement and intensity, but the philosopher of Australia is embarrassed when he asks himself to whom shall I award that of zealous devotion?
"Dr. Adam Clarke, who could never reconcile himself to the practice, deemed it due to his piety to find a useful purpose in the creation of tobacco by all-seeing Wisdom, and as that discovered by the instincts of all the nations of the planet, and practiced by mankind for three centuries, is wrong, the benevolent Wesleyan of Heydon, applied himself diligently and generously to correct the world, and to vindicate its Author. 'In some rare cases of internal injury tobacco may be used but not in the customary way.' Be it known, then, that the Creator has not created it in vain. Dr. Clarke must have been a very good-natured man. He tortured his brains to find a hope of pardon for Judas Iscariot, and held that the creature (Nachash) who tempted Eve was not a serpent but a monkey cursed by the forfeiture of patella and podex; therefore doomed to crawl! But I fear, if the present form of using tobacco be not the true one, we must despair of ever finding it, and people will go on smoking and 'hearing reason' as long as the world goes round. Robert Hall received a pamphlet denouncing the pipe. He read it, and returned it. 'I cannot, sir, confute your arguments, and I cannot give up smoking,' was his comment. It is loosely asserted that smoking is more prevalent among scholars, intellectualists, and men who live by their brains, than among artisans and subduers of the soil. This is an error. Tobacco is less a fosterer of thought than a solace of mental vacuity. The thinker smokes in the intervals of work, impatient of ennui as well as of lassitude, and the ploughman, the digger, the blacksmith or the teamster, lights his cutty for the same reason. No true worker, be he digger, or divine, blends real work with either smoking or drinking. Whenever you see a fellow drink or smoke during work, spot him for a gone coon; he will come to grief, and that right soon. Sleep stimulates thought, and sometimes a pipe will bring sleep, but trust it not of itself for either thought or strength. It combats ennui, lassitude, and intolerable vacuity, soothing the nerves and diverting attention from self. Sam Johnson came very near the mark: 'I wonder why a thing that costs so little trouble, yet has just sufficient semblance of doing something to break utter idleness, should go out of fashion. To be sure, it is a horrible thing blowing smoke out; but every man needs something to quiet him—as, beating with his feet.'
"Life is really too short for moralists and medici who have read Don Quixote, to attack a verdict arrived at and acted upon by the combined nations of the entire world, during the experience of three centuries, and apparently deepened by their advancing civilization. Give us rules and modifications, give us guides and correctives, give us warnings against excess, precipitancy, and neglect of other enjoyments, or of important duties, if you will. The urbane æstheticism that regulates pleasure also limits it; and true refinement ever modifies the indulgence it pervades. But it is emulating Mrs. Partington and her mop to attempt to preach down a world. When they do agree, their unanimity is irresistible. Prohibition may give zest to enjoyment, and provocation to curiosity, but can never overcome the instincts of nature or cravings of nervous irritability, and he who rises in rebellion against her absolute decree will respect the limits and study the laws of a recognized and regulated enjoyment.
"Let, then, the moralist point out what social duties may be imperilled; let the physician apprise us of the disorders to be guarded against; and let the lover of elegance see that no neglect or slight awaits her. Of abstract arguments we have seen the futility, of moral and medical crusades even the most patient are weary, and we gladly turn to something real, in the suffrages of a by-gone great man of acknowledged fame—Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson loved the 'durne weed,' and describes its every accident with the gusto of a connoisseur. Hobbes smoked, after his early dinner, pipes innumerable. Milton never went to bed without a pipe and a glass of water, which I cannot help associating with his:
'Adam waked,
So custom'd, for his sleep was æry light, of pure digestion bred
And temperate vapors bland!'
"Sir Isaac Newton was smoking in his garden at Woolsthorpe when the apple fell. Addison had a pipe in his mouth at all hours, at 'Buttons.' Fielding both smoked and chewed. About 1740 it became unfashionable, and was banished from St. James' to the country squires and parsons. Squire Western, in Tom Jones, arriving in town, sends off Parson Supple to Basingstoke, where he had left his Tobacco-box! The snuff-box was substituted. Lord Mark Kerr, a brave officer who affected the petit maitre (à la Pelham, in Lord Lytton's second novel), invented the invisible hinges, and it was this 'going out of fashion' that Jonson alluded to in 1774.