This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow;
He lets me have good tobacco.
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist.
The druggists and other tradesmen who sold tobacco in Elizabethan and Jacobean days had every provision for the convenience of their numerous customers. Some so-called druggists, it may be shrewdly suspected, did much more business in tobacco than they did in drugs. Dekker tells us of an apothecary and his wife who had no customers resorting to their shop "for any phisicall stuffe," but whose shop had many frequenters in the shape of gentlemen who "came to take their pipes of the divine smoake." That tobacco was often the most profitable part of a druggist's stock is also clear from the last sentence in Bishop Earle's character of "A Tobacco-Seller," one of the shortest in that remarkable collection of "Characters" which the Bishop issued in 1628 under the title of "Micro-Cosmographie."
"A Tobacco-Seller," says Earle, "is the onely man that findes good in it which others brag of, but do not; for it is meate, drinke, and clothes to him. No man opens his ware with greater seriousnesse, or challenges your judgement more in the approbation. His shop is the Randevous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses, and their communication is smoake. It is the place onely where Spaine is commended, and prefer'd before England itselfe. He should be well experienc'd in the world: for he ha's daily tryall of mens nostrils, and none is better acquainted with humors. Hee is the piecing commonly of some other trade which is bawde to his Tobacco, and that to his wife, which is the flame that follows this smoke."
This brief "Character" is hardly so pointed or so effective as some of the others in the "Micro-Cosmographie," but it would seem that the Bishop was not very friendly to tobacco. In the character of "A Drunkard" he says: "Tobacco serves to aire him after a washing [i.e. a drinking-bout], and is his onely breath, and breathing while." In another, a tavern "is the common consumption of the Afternoone, and the murderer, or maker away of a rainy day. It is the Torrid Zone that scorches the face, and Tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up."
The druggist-tobacconists were well stocked with abundance of pipes—those known as Winchester pipes were highly popular—with maple blocks for cutting or shredding the tobacco upon, juniper wood charcoal fires, and silver tongs with which the hot charcoal could be lifted to light the customer's pipe. The maple block was in constant use in those days, when the many present forms of prepared tobacco and varied mixtures were unknown. In Middleton and Dekker's "Roaring Girl," 1611, the "mincing and shredding of tobacco" is mentioned; and in the same play, by the way, we are told that "a pipe of rich smoak" was sold for sixpence.
The tobacco-tongs were more properly called ember-or brand-tongs. They sometimes had a tobacco-stopper riveted in near the axis of the tongs, and thus could be easily distinguished from other kinds of tongs. An example in the Guildhall Museum, made of brass, and probably of late seventeenth-century date, has the end of one of the handles formed into a stopper. In the same collection there are several pairs of ember-tongs with handles or jaws decorated. In one or two a handle terminates in a hook, by which they could be hung up when not required for use. In that delightful book of pictures and gossip concerning old household and farming gear, and old-fashioned domestic plenishings of many kinds, called "Old West Surrey," Miss Jekyll figures two pairs of old ember-or brand-tongs. One of these quite deserves the praise which she bestows upon it. "Its lines," says Miss Jekyll, "fill one with the satisfaction caused by a thing that is exactly right, and with admiration for the art and skill of a true artist." These homely tongs are fashioned with a fine eye for symmetry, and, indeed, for beauty of design and perfect fitness for the intended purpose. The ends which were to pick up the coal are shaped like two little hands, while "the edges have slight mouldings and even a low bead enrichment. The circular flat on the side away from the projecting stopper has two tiny engraved pictures; on one side of the joint a bottle and tall wine-glass, on the other a pair of long clay pipes crossed, and a bowl of tobacco shown in section." This beautiful little implement bears the engraved name of its Surrey maker, and the date 1795.
Country-folk nowadays often light their pipes in the old way, by picking up a live coal, or, in Ireland, a fragment of glowing peat, from the kitchen fire, with the ordinary tongs, and applying it to the pipe-bowl; but the old ember-tongs are seldom seen. They may still be found in some farmhouses and country cottages, which have not been raided by the agents of dealers in antique furniture and implements, but examples are rare. This is a digression, however, which has carried us far away from the early years of the seventeenth century.
It is pretty clear that not a few of the druggists who sold tobacco were great rascals. Ben Jonson has let us into some of their secrets of adulteration—the treatment of the leaf with oil and the lees of sack, the increase of its weight by other artificial additions to its moisture, washing it in muscadel and grains, keeping it in greased leather and oiled rags buried in gravel under ground, and by like devices. Other writers speak of black spice, galanga, aqua vitæ, Spanish wine, aniseeds and other things as being used for purposes of adulteration.
Trickery of another kind is revealed in a scene in Chapman's play "A Humorous Day's Mirth," 1599. A customer at an ordinary says: "Hark you, my host, have you a pipe of good tobacco?" "The best in the town," says mine host, after the manner of his class. "Boy, dry a leaf." Quietly the boy tells him, "There's none in the house, sir," to which the worthy host replies sotto voce, "Dry a dock leaf." But the diner's potations must have been powerful if they had left him unable to distinguish between the taste of tobacco and that of dried dock-leaf.