From a schism in tobacco-pipes, Knickerbocker dates the rise of parties in the Niew Nederlandts. “The rich and self-important burghers, who had made their fortunes, and could afford to be lazy, adhered to the ancient fashion, and formed a kind of aristocracy, known as the Long-pipes; while the lower order, adopting the reform of William Kieft, as more convenient in their handicraft employments, were branded with the plebeian name of Short-pipes.” Who may be considered as the founder of the English Short-pipe school, is more difficult to determine; it is nevertheless, of late years, a very popular one, and considerably outnumbers the aristocracy of Long-pipes. The variety of these instruments is almost infinite. There are all kinds of short clays, cutties, St. Omer, Gambier, meerschaum washed, coloured clay, and fancy clay of all shapes, grotesque, uncouth, stupid, and in some instances graceful. Pipes also of wood, of black ebony, green ebony, brier-root—whatever that may be—cherry-root, tulip-wood, rosewood, &c. Glass pipes, with reservoirs and without, smokers’ friends, and, if we may judge from their size, tobacconists’ friends; meerschaum bowls, massa bowls, porcelain bowls, clay bowls, of uncouth and monstrous heads, with eyes of glass and enamelled teeth, together with short stems and mounts for broken clays. Add to these, one knows not how many kinds of tobacco-pots, from a smiling damsel in all the glories of crinoline, to the dissevered head of Poor Dog Tray. The windows of retail tobacconists now-a-days more resemble a toy-shop, or a fancy stall from an arcade or bazaar, than the sober-looking windows of a retailer half a century ago. Mr. Frank Fowler informs us that the same tastes have migrated to Australia. “The cutty is of all shapes, sizes, and shades. Some are negro heads, set with rows of very white teeth; some are mermaids, showing their more presentable halves up the front of the bowls, and stowing away their weedy extremities under the stems. Some are Turkish caps, some are Russian skulls, some are houris, some are Empresses of the French, some are Margaret Catchpoles, some are as small as my lady’s thimble, others as large as an old Chelsea tea-cup. Everybody has one, from the little pinafore schoolboy, who has renounced his hardbake for his Hardham’s, to the old veteran who came out with the second batch of convicts, and remembers George Barrington’s prologue. Clergymen get up their sermons over the pipe; members of parliament walk the verandah of the Sydney House of Legislature, with the black bowl gleaming between their teeth. One of the metropolitan representatives was seriously ill just before I left, from having smoked forty pipes of Latakia at one sitting. A cutty bowl, like a Creole’s eye, is most prized when blackest. Some smokers wrap the bowls reverently in leather during the process of colouring; others buy them ready stained, and get (I suppose) the reputation of accomplished whiffers at once. Every young swell glories in his cabinet of dirty clay pipes. A friend of mine used to call a box of the little black things his ‘Stowe collection.’ Tobacco, I should add here, is seldom sold in a cut form; each man carries a cake about with him, like a card-case; each boy has his stick of Cavendish, like so much candy. The cigars usually smoked are Manillas, which are as cheap and good as can be met with in any part of the world. Lola Montez, during her Australian tour, spoke well of them. What stronger puff could they have than hers?”
[CHAPTER VI.]
SNIFFING AND SNEESHIN.
“‘Tis most excellent,’ said the monk. ‘Then do me the favour,’ I replied, ‘to accept of the box and all; and when you take a pinch out of it, sometimes recollect that it was the peace-offering of a man who once used you unkindly, but not from the heart.’”
Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.
Everybody, of course, knows all about the Franciscan and his snuff-box, with which this chapter begins. Sterne narrates it in his happiest vein, and all who read it are somehow sure to remember it. Boxes are exchanged; the traveller is left to himself. Now he moralises: “I guard this box as I would the instrumental parts of my religion, to help my mind on to something better. In truth, I seldom go abroad without it; and oft and many a time have I called up by it the courteous spirit of its owner to regulate my own in the justlings of the world. They had found full employment for his, as I learned from his story, till about the forty-fifth year of his age, when, upon some military services ill-requited, and meeting at the same time with a disappointment in the tenderest of passions, he abandoned the sword and the sex together, and took sanctuary, not so much in his convent as in himself.”
The word “snuff” is stated by competent authorities, to be an inflection of the old northern verb sniff, which latter word was in existence long before the invention or knowledge of the substance to which it now gives its name.[12] In its earlier signification, it was expressive of strong inhalation through the nostrils, or descriptive of any impatience. Hence arose the expressions in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to “snuff pepper” or “take in snuff.” Shakespeare makes a similar use of the phrase in Henry IV., in connection with a small box of perfume displayed by a courtier to the annoyance of Hotspur.
“He was perfumed like a milliner;
And, ’twixt his finger and his thumb, he held
A pouncet box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose, and took’t away again;