Preachers of all sections of the religious world delighted in a pinch of snuff. Sneezing was heard in the highest and humblest churches, and it even made St. Peter’s at Rome echo. The practice so excited the ire of Pope Innocent the Twelfth that he made an effort in 1690 to stop it in his churches, and “solemnly excommunicated all who should dare to take snuff.” Tyerman, in his “Life of Wesley,” tells us the great trouble the famous preacher had with his early converts. “Many of them were absolutely enslaved to snuff; some drank drams, &c., to remedy such evils, the preachers were enjoined on no account to take snuff, or to drink drams themselves; and were to speak to any one they saw snuffing in sermon time, and to answer the pretence that drams cured the colic and helped digestion.” Mr. Wesley cautioned a preacher going to Ireland against snuff, unless by order of a physician, declaring that no people were in such blind bondage to the silly, nasty, dirty custom as were the Irish. It is stated so far did Irishmen carry their love of snuffing, that it was customary, when a wake was on, to put a plate full of snuff upon the dead man’s, or woman’s stomach, from which each guest was expected to take a pinch upon being introduced to the corpse.
In the earlier days of snuff-taking, people generally ground their own snuff by rubbing roll tobacco across a small grater, usually fixed inside the snuff-box. We find in old-time writings many allusions to making snuff from roll tobacco. In course of time snuff was flavoured with rich essences, and scented snuffs found favour with the ladies. The man of refinement prided himself on his taste for perfumed powder. We find it stated in Fairholt’s book on “Tobacco,” that in the reign of William III. the beaux carried canes with hollow heads, that they might the more conveniently inhale a few grains through the perforations, as they sauntered in the fashionable promenades. Women quickly followed the lead of men in snuffing, in spite of satire in the Spectator and other papers of the period. The list of famous snuff-takers of the olden time is a long one, and only a few can be noticed here. Queen Charlotte heads the roll. She was persistent in the practice, and her unfilial and rude sons called her “Old Snuff.” Captain Gronow, when a boy at Eton, saw the Queen in company with the King taking an airing on the Terrace at Windsor, and relates “that her royal nose was covered with snuff both within and without.” Mrs. Siddons, “the queen of tragedy,” largely indulged in the use of snuff, both on and off the stage, even while taking her more important characters. Mrs. Jordan, another “stage star,” a representative of the comic muse, obtained animation from frequent use of snuff. Mrs. Unwin, the friend of Cowper, was extremely fond of it, and so was the poet, yet he was not a smoker. On snuff he wrote as follows:—
“The pungent, nose-refreshing weed,
Which whether pulverised it gain
A speedy passage to the brain,
Or whether touched with fire it rise
In circling eddies to the skies,
Does thought more quicken and refine
Than all the breath of all the Nine.”
Pope, in “The Rape of the Lock,” refers to ladies with their snuff-boxes always handy, and the fair Belinda found hers particularly useful in the battle she waged:—
“See, fierce Belinda on the baron flies
With more than usual lightning in her eyes;
And this bred lord, with manly strength endued,
She with one finger and a thumb subdued.
Just where the breath of life his nostrils drew
A charge of snuff the wily virgin threw;
The gnomes direct, to every atom just,
The pungent grains of titillating dust.
Sudden with startling tears each eye o’erflows,
And the high dome re-echoes to his nose.”
Napoleon’s legacy to the famous Lady Holland was a snuff-box, and Moore celebrated the gift in a verse written while he was in Paris in 1821:—
“Gift of the Hero, on his dying day,
To her who pitying watch’d, for ever nigh;
Oh, could he see the proud, the happy ray,
This relic lights up in her generous eye,
Sighing, he’d feel how easy ’tis to pay
A friendship all his kingdoms could not buy.”
Amongst ladies we have to include the charming Clarinda, a friend of Robert Burns, on whom he wrote when obliged to leave her:—
“She, the fair sun of all her sex,
Has blest my glorious day,
And shall, a glimmering planet, fix
My worship to its ray.”