Note Back to Main Text — Chapter IV

"The ordinary gallant, like Mercutio, would smoke while the dinner was serving up. Those who were rich and foolish carried with them smoking apparatus of gold or silver—tobacco-box, snuff-ladle, tongs to take up charcoal, and priming irons. There seems, from Decker's "Gull's Horn-Book," to have been smoking clubs, or tobacco ordinaries as they were called, where the entire talk was of the best shops for buying Trinidado, the Nicotine, the Cane, and the Pudding, whose pipe had the best bore, which would turn blackest, and which would break in the browning. At the theatres, the rakes and spendthrifts who, crowded the stage of Shakespeare's time sat on low stools smoking; they sat with their three sorts of tobacco beside them, and handed each other lights on the points of their swords, sending out their pages for more Trinidado if they required it. Many gallants 'took' their tobacco in the lords room over the stage, and went out to (Saint) Paul's to spit there privately. Shabby sponges and lying adventurers, like Bobadil, bragged of the number of packets of 'the most divine tobacco' they had smoked in a week, and told enormous lies of living for weeks in the Indies on the fumes alone. They affirmed it was an antidote to all poison; that it expelled rheums, sour humours, and obstructions of all kinds. Some doctors were of opinion that it would heal gout[43] and the ague, neutralise the effects of drunkenness, and remove weariness and hunger. The poor on the other hand, not disinclined to be envious and detracting when judging rich men's actions, laughed at men who made chimneys of their throats, or who sealed up their noses with snuff.