From Chapter 3: Tobacco's a musician,
And in a pipe delighteth,
It descends in a close
Through the organ of the nose
With a relish that inviteth.
These are merely a few examples of both the praise and the abuse which were lavished upon tobacco at this early stage in the history of
smoking. It would be easy to fill many pages with the like testimonials and denunciations, especially the latter, from writers of the early decades of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most curious thing in connexion with the immense number of allusions to
smoking in the literature of the period is that there is no mention whatever
of tobacco or
smoking in the plays of William Shakespeare. As Edmund Spenser, in the "Faerie Queene," speaks of
From Chapter 7: Hogarth's subscription ticket for the print of
Sigismunda was
Time smoking a Picture (1761). It represents an old man sitting on a fragment of statuary and
smoking a long pipe against a picture of a landscape which stands upon an easel before him. Below, on his left, is a large jar labelled "Varnish." The figure of Time is nude and has large wings. Volumes of smoke are pouring against the surface of the picture from both his mouth and the bowl of his long clay pipe. In
The Stage-Coach, or Country Inn-yard, is shown an old woman
smoking a pipe in the "basket" of the coach. The plate of
The Distrest Poet (1736) shows four books and three tobacco-pipes on a shelf. In the second of the "Election" series—the
Canvassing for Votes (1755)—a barber and a cobbler, seated at the table in the right-hand corner, are both
smoking long pipes. Apparently they are discussing the taking of Portobello by Admiral Vernon in 1739 with only six ships; for the barber is illustrating his talk by pointing with his twisted pipe-stem to six fragments which he has broken from the stem and arranged on the table in the shape of a crescent. In the frontispiece which Hogarth drew in 1762 for Garrick's farce of "The Farmer's Return from London," the worthy farmer, seated in his great chair, holds out a large mug in one hand to be filled with ale, while the other supports his long pipe, which he is
smoking with evident enjoyment.
