And purge my brain with gentle heat.
Tobacco, charmer of my mind,
When like the meteor’s transient gleam,
Thy substance gone to air, I find,
I think, alas, my life’s the same!
What else than lighted dust am I?
Thou show’st me what my fate will be;
And when thy sinking ashes die,
I learn that I must end like thee.
A more robust, nay, hilarious, spirit pervades the utterances of Dr. Henry Aldrich, Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, who in devotion to the weed surpassed even Dr. Parr of cloud-compelling fame. The genial don had found in the pipe a solace for his somewhat fretful temperament; it disposed him to look upon life with the benevolent composure of a mind at peace with the world. Indeed, the love he bore his pipe, says his biographer, Sir John Hawkins, was so excessive as to be an entertaining topic of discourse in the University. The belief that the Dean and his pipe were inseparable, led to wagers being laid on the chance of finding him without it. With the keen wits for fun and mischief, characteristic of schoolboys, students would now and then warily peer into his sanctum at early morn or dewy eve, in the hope of settling the disputed point. On one occasion the doctor, learning the object of their visit at an early hour in the morning, readily fell in with their humour, and declared to the foremost boy, that, ‘Your friend has lost. I am not smoking, only filling my pipe.’ The Dean’s geniality comes out well in his humorous ‘Catch on Tobacco,’ which appeared in his second book of The Pleasant Musical Companion, published in 1687. He tells us that it is ‘to be sung by four men at the time of smoking their pipes.’ The first verse is as follows:—