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cheap tobacco-stoppers were cut in hard wood, some few in mahogany; but by far the greatest number were cast in brass, like the specimens we engrave, which are all in that material, with the exception of Fig. 3.

In the Shrubs of Parnassus, a small volume of poetical essays, published in 1760 (under an assumed name), by James Boswell, the famous biographer of Johnson, is one devoted to the tobacco-stopper, which is curiously descriptive of those in ordinary use at that time :

"O! let me grasp thy waist, be thou of wood,
Or lævigated steel, for well 'tis known

Thy habit is diverse. In iron clad

Sometimes thy feature roughens to the sight;
And oft transparent art thou seen in glass,
Portending frangibility. The son

Of labouring mechanism here displays
Exuberance of skill. The curious knot,
The motley flourish winding down thy sides,
And freaks of fancy pour upon the view
Their complicated charms, and as they please,
Astonish. While with glee thy touch I feel
No harm my finger dreads.* No fractured pipe
I ask, or splinter's aid, wherewith to press
The rising ashes down. Oh! bless my hand,
Chief when thou com'st with hollow circle, crown'd
With sculptured signet, bearing in thy womb
The treasured Corkscrew. Thus a triple service
In firm alliance may'st thou boast."

It was a not unfrequent desire with the old smoker to associate his tobacco-stopper with some great person or thing. A tree planted by a great man, a fragment

* It is recorded of Sir Isaac Newton that on one occasion he used the finger of the lady he was courting for a stopper, as he sat and smoked in philosophic abstraction beside her.

of a celebrated ship, a beam of an historic mansion, were each taxed for a tobacco-stopper. The custom is very old, for Taylor, the Water Poet, notes, in his Wandering to See the Wonders of the West, 1649, that he saw a sprig of the famous Glastonbury thorn, which the monks at that place had celebrated for its miraculous flowering at Christmas, and which was cut down by the parliamentary soldiers. He says: "I saw the sayd branch, I did take a dead sprigge from it, wherewith I made two or three tobacco-stoppers, which I brought to London."

The reader of the Spectator will remember the remark made by Sir Roger de Coverley, when viewing the coronation chairs in Westminster Abbey: "If Will Wimble were with us, and saw those two chairs, it would go hard but he would get a tobacco-stopper out of one or t'other of them."

The flint and steel and tinder, which the old smoker was necessitated to carry on a journey, has been superseded in our days by many ingenious inventions. German tinder first took the place of the old ragtinder and dried moss; and this is still used, separated into thin strips, but coated at top with an explosive composition, which ignites by friction; small boxes will contain a packet of this tinder, a part of the case being rough to ignite it. Matches, headed with a lump of combustible matter, which burns long enough to light any pipe or cigar thoroughly, are also to be obtained in boxes which occupy very small space in the pocket. Those who are fond of a display of showy

materials for obtaining a light, are provided with an elaborate apparatus of silver tubing, through which a smouldering cord of coloured cotton can be drawn, lit by means of a flint, elegantly fashioned from the purest stone, struck against an equally tasteful steel; the whole process being an elegant and costly realization of "much ado about nothing," chiefly patronized by "heavy swells," who take tobacco more for the sake of ostentation than pleasure.

There is no indulgence that more completely equalizes itself to all classes than that of tobacco. It is possible, as we have seen, to make it a very expensive taste; but it is equally possible to make it a cheap one. Tobacco will give as much enjoyment to the poor man in his clay pipe, as to the nobleman in his jewelled Meerschaum. Indeed, it may be doubted if the pleasures of the poor are not greater; and there is much truth, as well as sound philosophy, in the morale of tobacco-smoking, which we have seen enforced by many whose opinions are of value, and whose indulgence has been limited to temperate and wholesome enjoyment.

CHAPTER V.

SNUFF AND SNUFF-BOXES.

WHEN tobacco was originally recommended to the attention of the Old World, its claims as a curative agent were strongly asserted; one mode of using the leaves was to pulverize them, and inhale the powder by the nose this custom, as well as all others connected with the European form of using the plant, was adopted from the Indians. We have quoted, in p. 16, the description given by the Friar who accompanied Columbus in 1494, of their mode of inhaling it for medicinal purposes. It was consequently recommended for all diseases of the head brought on by colds; and particularly that one popularly termed the pose, a dry stoppage which much troubled our ancesPhysicians had, on the faith of old Indian usages, on which they seem to have implicitly relied, recommended it. Catherine de Medicis was the first so to use it, within a short period after the introduction of the tobacco-plant by Jean Nicot; and the new sternutatory was first handed about in the Court of France about 1562. This Queen's patronage decided the success of the plant, which was called Herbe à la

tors.

ants.

Reine; and snuff was for a long time a fashion with the court-party, held in abomination by the ProtestThe literary controversy was violent; some physicians contended that, if it concealed a vicious odour of the breath, it also injured the digestive power: while some theologians affirmed that it inspired contemptuous feelings, by inducing indolence.

Examples of recipes used by old physicians, when tobacco was considered in the light of a medicinal herb, may be found in Neander: we have given some specimens in our quotations from the English Doctor Edmund Gardiner's Triall of Tobacco (1610), see p. 49 ; we will now quote from the latter what he recommends in the way of snuffs. He prefaces his remarks by saying:

Sternutatories, especially those which are made of tabacco, being drawne up into the nostrels, cause sneesing, consuming and spending away grosse and slimie humors from the ventricles of the braine. These kind of remedies must needes doe good where the brain is repleat with many vapours, for those that have a lethargy, or vertiginy, in all long griefes, paines and aches of the head, in continuall senselesses, or benumming of the braine, and for a hicket that proceedeth of repletion."

The following is one of his specifics :

Rec. Piperis,

Zinziberis, ana i.

Pyrethri,

Foliorum siccorum tabaci ij.

Trita naribus inspirentur ante cibum.

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