Of the Devil’s glyster pipe.
The play accorded so well with the King’s humour that he commanded a repetition of the performance. At that time tobacco-smoking was commonly indulged in at theatres. In Bartholomew Fair a pleasure seeker, named Coke, enters a puppet show and asks of the master, ‘Ha’ you none of your pretty impudent boys, now, to bring stools, fill tobacco, fetch ale, and beg money, as they have at other houses?’
We pass on to the pages of Thomas Dekker—Dekker the gay, the light-hearted, and always good-humoured, who says of himself that, ‘the imagination runs to and fro, the fantasie flies round about, the vital spirits walk up and down, yea, the very pulses shew activities, and with their hammers are still beating, so that in my very dreams it is whispered in my ears that I must be up and doing something.’ Among his many delightful sketches of social life in London, the Gulls Hornbook may well rank first. He makes sport of the young gallants of the city who affect the fashionable habit of ‘taking tobacco,’ and instructs them how to handle, in the most approved style, the implements with which they are to be provided. In the same bantering tone he apostrophises tobacco thus: ‘Make me thine adopted heir, that, inheriting the virtues of thy whiffs, I may distribute them among all nations, and make the fantastic Englishman above all the rest more cunning in the distinction of thy roll-Trinidado, leaf and pudding, than the whitest toothed blackamore in all Asia.’
In one of those unaccountable freaks of temper which at times seem to take possession of genius Jonson, in the The Poetaster made an unprovoked attack upon Dekker, who, in no way daunted, flew to arms, and in his Satiromastix or the Untrussing of the Humerous Poet, proved himself to be no unworthy match for his more ponderous assailant. In this masterpiece of Dekker’s we come upon the earliest allusion to women smokers. Asinius Babo meeting with friends proffers his pipe saying, ‘’tis at your service, gallants, and the tobacco too; ’tis right good pudding I can tell you: a lady or two took a pipeful or two at my hands and praised it ’fore the heavens.’ We learn from Aubrey that in his day (1680) it was considered very improper for ‘feamale persons’ to take tobacco. But women’s curiosity respecting the new allurement to indolence with which men were so greatly enamoured very naturally led them to taste the forbidden leaf. Bearing on this point is a piquant story told by Miss Pardoe in her admirable History of the Court of Louis XIV. The Grand Monarque had a great aversion to tobacco, and no one ventured to smoke in his presence. But his daughters had noticed how comfortable and cosy the men of the Swiss Guard looked while smoking their pipes, and longed for a more intimate acquaintance with the novelty. They grew weary of the restraints of the court circle and sought freedom in their own apartments. On one occasion, when the Dauphin had at a late hour quitted the card-table, he heard noises of revelry while passing their quarter of the Palace. Entering to ascertain the cause, he was astonished to find the princesses engaged in smoking. Their pipes had been borrowed from the officers, who doubtless were instructing them how to make clouds, rings and squirts. Miss Pardoe speaks strongly; she says that when the princesses became weary of the ‘gravity and etiquette of the court circle they were accustomed to celebrate a species of orgie in their own apartments, after supper.’ But after all were they not Eve’s daughters—what else could be expected?
In England the paper warfare over the merit or demerit of the ‘Indian’s weed,’ signalized by King James, lasted well through two centuries. Beginning with some slight skirmishing, as in Work for Chimney Sweepers we come to a doughty champion of the royal cause in the person of ‘Josuah Sylvester, Gent:’ he who with quixotic valour sent forth a ‘Volley of Holy Shot Thundered from Mount Helicon.’ In dedicatory lines addressed to George, Duke of Buckingham, he invokes the aid of the royal favourite to enable him to overthrow the
… Proud oppression
Of th’ Infidel, usurping faith’s possession,
That Indian tyrant, England’s only shame