The ascetic of the Greek Church, however, can eclipse this story of Nimrod and the Assyrian monarch who loved his pipe, with a tradition carefully preserved in its archives of Noah himself, tempted by the Evil One, having fallen under the intoxicating fumes of tobacco. The ingenuous scribe relates (though this may be apocryphal) that Noah, resting upon the summit of Mount Ararat after his toils on the swollen waters, happened to place his hand on a tobacco-pipe charged with the comforting herb, and Satan, envious of his happiness, urged the patriarch to prolong the indulgence until sleep fell upon his eyes. Where the soil is ready for the seed the merest figment takes root and flourishes abundantly.
Persons of a poetic temperament who find in speculative dreaming pleasure more satisfying than aught they can derive from the study of prosaic reality, usually turn their thoughts towards the East, to the land of mystery and gorgeous imagery, where man first awoke to a wondering contemplation of the phenomena of nature, asking himself what the earth and sky could be, and marking out in bold outline as he gazed into the star-lit firmament the signs by which we to-day recognise the zodiac. Entering these regions of hoary tradition, the marvel-loving wanderer from the West finds his path strewn with relics of our early progenitors; here he may revel in endless variety of legendary lore garnered from rich fields of poetic fancy. Does he wish to learn of the Moslem sage the origin of the weed whose balmy breath
From East to West
Cheers the tar’s labour, or the Turkman’s rest?
Let him listen to his words as he relates how the Prophet, walking in his garden at early dawn, came upon a viper stiff with cold, lying in the grass. ‘Full of compassion, he took it up and warmed it in his bosom; but when the reptile recovered, it bit him. “Why art thou thus ungrateful?” asked the Prophet. The viper answered: “Were I to spare thee, another of thy race would kill me, for there is no gratitude on earth. By Allah, I will bite thee.” “Since thou hast sworn by Allah, keep thy vow,” said the Prophet, and held out his hand to be bitten. But as the reptile bit him, the Prophet sucked the poison from the wound, and spat it on the ground. And lo! there sprang up a plant in which the serpent’s venom is combined with the Prophet’s mercy, and men call it tobacco.’
Unhappily for the champions of Asia’s prior claim to the weed, those enchanted mirrors of Arabian social life, The Thousand And One Nights, reflect no sign, not the faintest shadow of aught resembling circling eddies from the tobacco-bowl. In the early days of the new indulgence its lawfulness was warmly disputed in Mahomedan countries. Both Sultan and Shah looked with suspicion at this new device of the Giaour, and inflicted the severest punishment upon all who ventured to console their sorrows with the pipe. In the warmth of conflicting opinion, the Koran was appealed to, and a Moslem ascetic was found who read to the faithful a passage (from a revised version, no doubt) wherein it was foretold that, ‘In the latter days there shall be men bearing the name of Moslem, but who are not really such, and they shall smoke a certain weed which shall be called tobacco.’ A device so simple, giving the American name of the plant, could deceive no one but those who were willing to be deceived. It helped, however, to smooth the way towards the desired reconciliation; and then the Turkish traveller, Eulia Effendi, contributed towards a peaceful solution of the much-vexed question the best fruits of what little ingenuity he possessed. He declared that he had found, deeply embedded in the wall of an old edifice, so old that it must have been reared long before the birth of the Prophet, a tobacco-pipe which even then smelt of tobacco! The pious frauds of Moslem ascetics could not go beyond this. Here was the sanction of antiquity, if not of the Prophet, for the indulgence they all loved, before which Sultan, and Shah, and Koran gradually gave way, yielding to St Nicotine the mild sway she holds over her votaries. And it must needs be admitted that the claim for a knowledge of tobacco in Western Asia before the days of Columbus has no stronger prop to rest upon than this pipe found in the crevice of an old wall, and which still smelt of tobacco,—dropped in by some poor Turk fearful of the torture in store for him if caught smoking. Russell, in his narrative of a visit to Aleppo in 1603, says that tobacco-smoking, then so commonly indulged in at home, was unknown there. And Sandys, writing of the Turks as he found them in 1610, speaks of tobacco as just introduced into Constantinople by the English. How rapidly the taste for the weed spread over the countries of the near East, and the hold it had taken upon all classes, is shown in many a homely saying among the people, such as, ‘A pipe of tobacco and a dish of coffee are a complete entertainment;’ or, in the Persian proverb that, ‘Coffee without tobacco is meat without salt.’
Doctor Yates had gone to the land of the Pharaohs for enlightenment on things hidden from the vulgar; and among other things rare and wonderful which presented themselves to his astonished gaze, he gravely assures the reader of his Modern History and Condition of Egypt (published in 1843) that on the wall of an ancient tomb at Thebes he saw a painting in which was represented a smoking-party; beings of our own species sitting together enjoying, possibly, social chat over the fragrant weed. Here was indeed one of those touches of nature which makes the whole world kin. Standing in the mystic glow of an Egyptian sky, in the living presence of the marvellous works of men’s hands wrought six thousand years ago, his imagination bridges the space of ages, and he realises the unity of our race in the familiar scene before him. The uplifted doctor did not recognise in the painting a representation of the ancient art of glass-blowing. The tricks the imagination plays upon us at times would be very amusing were it not for the ruffle they give to one’s self-love. Some men, rather than admit they were, or could be deceived, will hold to their error through all time and in the face of every rebuff.
It is not improbable that some varieties of the tobacco-plant may be indigenous to the Old World. There are about forty, of which seldom more than three are cultivated for consumption as tobacco; Virginia (Nicotina tabacum), Syrian (Nicotina rustica), and Shiraz (Nicotina Persica). Diligent research, however, extending over many years, has failed to bring to light any evidence of the existence in Europe or western Asia of either of these plants before the Spaniards discovered America. The allusions made by Dioscorides, Strabo, and Pliny to a practice common among both the Greeks and the Romans of inhaling the fumes of tussilago and other vegetable substances, have no bearing on tobacco-smoking, nor on any general habit. They refer rather to the use of certain herbs as remedies for affections of the throat and chest, used much in the same way as our forbears used certain other herbs for the cure of similar ailments. Most people condemned to suffer the rigours of an English winter have experienced kitchen-treatment of the kind, when shrouded in a blanket over a bowl of steaming medicaments they lay siege to the citadel held by the bacteria of influenza. From Pliny we learn that a tribe of unknown barbarians burned the roots of a species of cypress, and inhaled the fumes for the reduction of enlarged spleen—a malady very common among the inhabitants of the plains of southern India. He tells us also (xxiv., 84) that the Romans smoked coltsfoot through a reed or pipe for the relief of obstinate cough and difficult breathing. Here it may be of interest to mention the discovery in recent years of a small description of smoking-pipes, resembling in size and form the cutty of the Scot or the dhudeen of the Irish peasant, among Roman structures, both in these islands and on the Continent.
Dr. Bruce, in his History of the Roman Wall, speaking of these pipes, asks: ‘Shall we enumerate smoking-pipes amongst the articles belonging to the Roman period? Some of them have, indeed, a medieval aspect; but the fact of their being frequently found in Roman stations along with pottery and other remains, undoubtedly Roman, should not be overlooked.’ The Abbé Cocket had found similar clay pipes in the Roman Necropolis near Dieppe, and in his work on subterranean Normandy he says they must surely have belonged to the seventeenth century. But, on subsequently hearing of Doctor Bruce’s discovery of similar pipes in his exploration of the Roman Wall, he reverted to his first opinion, that those he had himself found were indeed Roman. Since then Baron de Bonstetten has investigated the subject; and in his work entitled Recueil des Antiquités he gives drawings of these pipes, and declares his opinion to be that they are fair specimens of European smoking-instruments in use before the days of Columbus, and possibly before those of Julius Cæsar. That smoking-pipes have been found among authentic Roman remains is beyond question. What use the Romans made of them we have already learned from Pliny; and doubtless the Roman soldier, on outpost duty in this fog-begirt island, would often have need of whatever little comfort he could get out of his small pipeful of coltsfoot.
Both in Ireland and Scotland somewhat similar pipes have been picked up in remote places, and have been attributed by imaginative country folk to the fairies and elves, to the Celts and to the Danes. Raleigh’s sowing the seeds of Ireland’s first tobacco-plant in his garden at Youghal is lost sight of in a desire to yield to antiquity the credit due to modern enterprise. About a century ago (to be exact, in the year 1784), the fine Milesian imagination was afforded an opportunity of soaring into the glorious region of an indefinable past, when the headman of every village was indeed a king. In an ancient tomb—far too old to bear the vulgar indication of a date—which had been opened at Bannockstown in Kildare, there was found firmly held between the teeth of the silent occupant a tobacco-pipe, small, but perfectly formed. Here, then, was positive proof of the antiquity of smoking in Ireland, ages, possibly, before the Saxon or Danish barbarian had invaded her shores. This important discovery naturally created a commotion among the learned of the Emerald Isle, which soon found mellifluent expression in the Journal of Anthologia Hibernica. Visions of a revivified Celtic history, clothed in the poetic vestments which properly belong to a venerable, half-forgotten past, rose to cheer young Ireland’s aspirations; and now could be sung with renewed fervour,—