Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged

The cover was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Japanese smokers.

THE
SEVEN SISTERS
OF
SLEEP.

POPULAR HISTORY OF THE SEVEN PREVAILING
NARCOTICS OF THE WORLD.

BY
M. C. COOKE,
DIRECTOR OF THE METROPOLITAN SCHOLASTIC MUSEUM.

“‘How many are you, then?’ said I.
‘O Master, we are seven.’”
Wordsworth.

“To re-create for man, whate’er
Was lost in Paradise.”
Southey’s Thalaba.

LONDON:
JAMES BLACKWOOD, PATERNOSTER ROW.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

Dedication.

to all LOVERS of TOBACCO, in all parts of the world,
juvenile and senile, masculine and feminine;
and to all ABSTAINERS,
voluntary and involuntary——
to all OPIOPHAGI, at home and abroad,
whether experiencing the pleasures, or pains
of the seductive drug——
to all HASCHISCHANS, east and west,
in whatever form they choose
to woo the spirit of dreams——
to all BUYEROS, malayan or chinese,
whether their siri-boxes are full, or empty——
to all COQUEROS, white or swarthy,
from the base to the summit
of the mighty cordilleras——
to all VOTARIES of STRAMONIUM and HENBANE,
highlander, or lowlander—
and
to all SWALLOWERS of AMANITA,
either in siberia or elsewhere——
these pages come greeting
with the best wishes
of their obedient servant,

The Author.

PREFATORY PREMONITION.

“A certain miller was much annoyed by a goblin, who used to come and set his mill at work at night when there was no grain to be ground, greatly to the danger of the machinery, so he desired a person to watch. This person, however, always fell asleep, but once woke up from a nap time enough to see the mill in full operation, a blazing fire, and the goblin himself, a huge hairy being, sitting by the side thereof. ‘Fat’s yer name?’ said the Highlander. ‘Ourisk,’ said the unwelcome guest; ‘and what is yours?’ ‘Myself,’ was the reply; ‘her nain-sell.’ The goblin now went quietly to sleep, and the Highlander, taking a shovel of hot coals, flung them into the hairy lap of the goblin, who was instantly in a blaze. Out ran the monster to his companions, making as much noise as he could. ‘Well,’ said they, ‘who set you on fire?’ ‘Myself,’ said the unlucky monster. ‘Well, then, you must put it out yourself,’ was the consoling rejoinder.”

Some of my readers may arrive at the conclusion, that I, like the Ourisk, have trespassed upon other people’s property, and ground my corn at their mill. Let it not be assumed, on my account, inasmuch as I do not myself make that assumption, that I have journeyed from Cornhill to Cathay, in search of those who habituate themselves to the indulgences herein set forth. Others have laboured, and I have eaten of the fruits of their labours. Travellers numberless have contributed to furnish my table, in some instances, without even thanks for their pains. This is the way of the world, and I am not a whit better than my neighbours. Let it, therefore, be understood, that I make no pretensions to aught beyond the form in which these numerous contributions are now presented to the reader. The tedium of wading through volume after volume in search of information on these subjects has been performed for him, and compacted together into a pocket companion, saving, thereby, to him, a large amount of trouble, and a small amount of vexation. Private correspondence has furnished a portion of the information. Those who may recognise my own poaching pranks upon their domains may throw coals of fire upon my lap, and leave “Myself” to extinguish the flame.

Herein the reader will find only a popular history of the most important Narcotics indulged in, and the customs connected with that indulgence. Mere statistical details have as much as possible been avoided, and those calculated to interest the more matter-of-fact reader added in a tabulated form, as an appendix. The majority of these tables have been compiled from official documents, trade circulars, or commercial returns, and care has been taken to render them correct up to the period of their dates. In this department I am largely indebted to the valuable assistance of P. L. Simmonds, Esq., F.S.S., to whom I thus tender my thanks.

Those who are desirous of seeing specimens of the narcotics named in the following pages, can visit either the Museum of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the East India House Museum, the Food Department in the gallery of the South Kensington Museum, or the Industrial Museum in the gallery of the central transept of the Crystal Palace, in each of which they will meet with some of the articles named, though in none of them will they discover all. In the former two are illustrations of the opium manufacture, and at Kensington an interesting series of tobaccos, and other articles connected with the indulgence therein, and also with opium-smoking in China, together with some of the tobacco substitutes and sophistications. None of these collections are so complete as they might be. Public museums of this kind have every facility for doing more to instruct the public on the common things of every-day life: why they do not accomplish this, is as much a fault, perhaps, of the public as of themselves. There are hopes, however, to be entertained that one, at least, of these institutions will exhibit, in a complete and collected form, the principal narcotics and their substitutes.

Why I should have chosen such a title for my volume, and wherefore invested it with a legend, is matter of little importance. It was a fancy of my own, and if any think fit to quarrel with it, they may do so, without disturbing my peace of mind. The reply of the Ourisk to his companions, as to who set him on fire, was, “Myself.”

Parents seldom baptize their children with a name pleasing to all their friends and relatives, yet the child manages to get through the world with it, and—dies at last.

M. C. C.

Lambeth.

CONTENTS.

THE SEVEN SISTERS OF SLEEP.

[CHAPTER I.]
SOMEWHAT FABULOUS.

“Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,

Beloved from pole to pole.”——Coleridge.

During the Decian persecution, seven inhabitants of Ephesus retired to a cave, six were persons of some consequence, the seventh was their servant; from hence they despatched the attendant occasionally to purchase food for them. Decius, who like most tyrants possessed long ears, hearing of this, ordered the mouth of the cave to be stopped up while the fugitives were sleeping. After a lapse of some hundred years, a part of the masonry at the mouth of the cave falling, the light flowing in awakened them. Thinking, as Rip Van Winkle also thought, that they had enjoyed a good night’s rest, they despatched their servant to buy provisions. All appeared to him strange in Ephesus; and a whimsical dialogue took place, the citizens accusing him of having found hidden treasure, he persisting that he offered the current coin of the realm. At length, the attention of the emperor was excited, and he went, in company with the bishop, to visit them. They related their story, and shortly after expired.

Thus much chroniclers narrate of the seven sleepers of Ephesus. All are not agreed as to the place where this extraordinary event occurred. It has been assigned also to the “mountain of the seven sleepers,” near Tersous. It may have been claimed by the citizens of twenty other ancient cities, for aught we can tell: Faith removes mountains. But the number remains intact. Mahomet wrote of seven heavens—no Mahometan takes the trouble to believe in less. The “wise men were but seven;” there were seven poets of the age of Theocritus; seven of the daughters of Pleione elevated to the back of Taurus; and

“There were seven pillars of gothic mould,

In Chillon’s dungeon, dark and old;”

and wherefore not seven sleepers at Ephesus or Tersous; or seven sisters of

“Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep?”

Although not to be found in Livy, or Hesiod, or Ovid, or any of the fathers of history or fable, there is a legend of the latter seven, which may be considered in the light of an abstract of title of certain seven sisters, to be included in the list of immortal sevens who have honoured the earth by making it their abode.

It is many thousands of years since Sleep received from her parent, as a dowry of love, an empire, unequalled in extent by any other which the earth ever acknowledged. Her domain embraced “the round world, and they that dwell therein.” From pole to pole, and from ocean to ocean, she swayed her sceptre. And it was assigned her that man should devote one-third of his existence in paying homage at the foot of her throne. All monarchs from Ninus to Napoleon have done her honour. All ladies from Rhodope to Cleopatra, and from Helen to Clothilde, have admitted her claim to ascendency. And all serfs, and all captives, from Epictetus to Abd-el-Kader, have forgotten their bonds and their captivity, and bowed, on an equality with kings, beneath her nod.

Sleep had seven sisters. Envious of her throne, and jealous of her power, they complained bitterly that no heritage, and no government, and no homage was theirs. Then they strove to deceive men, and counterfeit the blessings which Sleep conferred, and thus to steal the affections of her subjects from the universal monarch, and transfer them to themselves. Herein they toiled and invented many strange devices; and though they beguiled many, these all fell back again to the allegiance they had sworn of old.

“O my sisters!” said Sleep, “wherefore do you strive to instil discontent into the hearts of my subjects and breed discord in my dominions? Know ye not, that all mortals must fain obey me, or die? Your enchantments cannot diminish my votaries, and only serve to increase my power. And men, who for a while are cheated of the blessings I confer, woo me at last with increased ardour, and with songs of gratitude fall at my feet.”

Morphina first replied—

“We know full well, proud sister, how wide is your empire, and how great your power, but we too must reign, and our kingdoms will soon compare with yours. Let us but share with you in ruling the world, or we will rule it for ourselves.”

“Sisters! let us be at peace with each other. Is there not two-thirds of the life of man free from my control? Why should you not steal from iron-handed care enough of power to make you queens as potent, or little less than me? My minister of dreams shall aid you by his skill, and visions more gorgeous, and illusions more splendid, than ever visited a mortal beneath my sway, shall attend the ecstacies of your subjects.”

The sisters were reconciled henceforth. And anon thousands and millions of Tartar tribes and Mongolian hordes welcomed Morphina, and blessed her for her soothing charms and benignant rule—blessed her for her theft from the hours of sorrow and care—blessed her for the marvels of dreams the most extravagant, and visions the most gorgeous that ever arose in the brain of dweller in the glowing East.

More extended became the sway of the golden-haired Virginia, until four-fifths of the race of mortals burned incense upon her altars, or silently proffered thank-offerings from their hearts. Curling ever upwards from the hearth of the Briton and the forest of the Brazilian—from the palaces of Ispahan and the wigwams of the Missouri—from the slopes of the eternal hills and the bosom of the mighty deep, arose the fragrant odours of her votaries, mingled with the hum of pæans in her praise.

Beneath the shadow of palms, in the sultry regions of the sun, the dark impetuous Gunja held her court. There did the sons of the Ganges and the Nile, the Indus and the Niger, own her sovereignty; and there did the swarthy Hindoo and the ebon African hold festivals in her honour. And, though the hardy Norseman scorned her proffered offices, she established her throne in millions of ardent and affectionate hearts.

Not far away, the red-lipped Siraboa raised her graceful standard from the summit of a feathery palm; and the islanders of the Archipelago, in proa and canoe, hastened to do her homage. The murderous Malay stayed his uplifted weapon, to bless her name; and savage races, that ne’er bowed before, fell prostrate at her feet.

Honoured by the Incas, and flattered by priests—persecuted by Spanish conquerors, but victorious, Erythroxylina established herself in the Bolivian Andes and the Cordilleras of Peru. With subjects the most devoted and faithful, she has for ages received the homage of a kingdom of enthusiastic devotees.

Two, less favoured, less beautiful, and less successful of the sisters, pouting and repining at the good fortune that had attended the others, secluded themselves from the rest of the world, and rushed into voluntary exile. Datura, ruddy as Bellona, fled to the Northern Andes; and in those mountainous solitudes collected a devoted few of frantic followers, and established a miniature court. The pale and dwarfish Amanita, turning her back on sunny lands and glowing skies, sought and found a home and a refuge, a kingdom and a court, in the frozen wastes of Siberia.

And now in peace the sisters reign, and the world is divided between them. When care, or woe, or wan disease, steals for a time the mortal from his allegiance to the calm and blue-eyed Sleep, then do the sisters ply their magic arts to win him back again, and, by their soothing influence, lull him to rest once more, and again unlock the portals of the palace of dreams; then issues from the trembling lips the half-heard murmur of a whispered blessing on the

SEVEN SISTERS OF SLEEP.[1]

In all times Sleep has been a fertile theme with poets—one on which the best and worst has been written. All forms in heaven and in earth have submitted themselves to become similes; and columns of adjectives have done duty in the service since Edmund Spenser raised his House of Sleep, where

“careless Quiet lyes,

Wrapt in eternal silence, farre from enimyes.”

No monarch has numbered so many odes in his praise, or had so many poet laureates “all for love.” These, though not so long, are quite as worthy as the one we heard when George III. was no longer king. Perhaps that same little tyrant, Love, has come in for even a larger share of what some would call “twaddle.” In the sunny morn of youth, these hung upon our lips, and dwelt in our hearts, with less of doubt than disturbs their present repose. Old age makes us sleepy, and we sing—

“O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,

That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind

Till it is hushed and smooth! O unconfined

Restraint, imprisoned liberty, great key

To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,

Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves,

Echoing grottoes, full of tumbling waves

And moonlight; aye, to all the mazy world

Of silvery enchantments!”——Endymion.

“God gave sleep to the bad,” said Sadi, “in order that the good might be undisturbed.” Yet to good and bad sleep is alike necessary. During the hours of wakefulness the active brain exerts its powers without cessation or rest, and during sleep the expenditure of power is balanced again by repose. The physical energies are exhausted by labour, as by wakefulness are those of the mind; and if sleep comes not to reinvigorate the mental powers, the overtaxed brain gives way, and lapses into melancholy and madness. Men deprived of rest, as a sentence of death, have gone from the world raving maniacs; and violent emotions of the mind, without repose, have so acted upon the body, that, as in the case of Marie Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, and others, their hair has grown white in a single night—

“As men’s have grown from sudden fears.”[2]

Mind and body alike suffer from the want of sleep, the spirit is broken, and the fire of the ardent imagination quenched. Who can wonder that when disease or pain has racked and tortured the frame, and prevented a subsidence into a state so natural and necessary to man, he should have resorted to the aid of drugs and potions, whereby to lull his pains, and dispel the care which has banished repose, and woo back again—

“the certain knot of peace,

The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe;

The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,

Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.”

Leigh Hunt has well said, “It is a delicious moment that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render this remaining in one posture delightful; the labour of the day is gone—a gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you—the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the mind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye—it is closed—the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.”

It is this universal sense of the blessing of sleep which takes hold of the mind with such a religious feeling, that the appearance of a sleeping form, whether of childhood or age, checks our step, and causes us to breathe softly lest we disturb their repose. We can scarce forbear whispering, while standing before the well-known picture of the “Last Sleep of Argyle,” lest by louder or more distinct articulation, we should rob the poor old man of a moment of that absence of sorrow which sleep has brought to him for the last time.

Shakespeare has made the murder of Duncan to seem the more revolting in that it was committed while he slept. Macbeth himself must have felt this while exclaiming—

“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murther sleep, the innocent sleep;

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’”

Had Desdemona been sent to her last account at once, when her lord entered the room and kissed her as she slept, we feel that all our pity for the jealous Moor would have been turned to hate, and our detestation of him been so great that no room had been left for execration of the villanous Iago, who now seems to be the Mephistopheles, the evil genius, of the work.

“A blessing,” says Sancho Panza, “on him who first invented sleep; it wraps a man all round like a cloak.” But neither Sancho nor any one else will give us a blessing if we suffer ourselves to go to sleep in thinking over it, at the very threshold of our enterprise, and before indulging in communion with the seven sisters of whom we have spoken. It was a trite remark of a divine that “where drowsiness begins, devotion ends,” and needs application as much to book writers as to sermon preachers. Although we may not have the power to check an occasional yawn, in which there may be as much temporal relief as in a good sneeze, let us avoid the premonitory sinking of the upper eyelids, by calling in the aid of Francesco Berni to release us from the spell of sleep, and introduce us to “the sisters” of the olden time.

“Quella diceva ch’era la piu bella

Arte, il piu bel mestier che si facesse;

Il letto er’ una veste, una gonella

Ad ognun buona che se la mettesse.”

Orland. Innamor, lib. iii. cant. vii.

[CHAPTER II.]
THE SISTERS OF OLD.

“What are these,

So withered, and so wild in their attire;

That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,

And yet are on’t?”——Macbeth.

There is no reason to doubt that the ancients were, in a manner, acquainted with some of the narcotics known to us, although they did not indulge in them as stimulants or luxuries. The antiquarian, it is true, has failed to unearth the tobacco-box of Claudius, or the pipe of Nero—however much the latter may have been given to smoke. And no one has as yet discovered a snuff-box bearing the initials of Marc Antony, whence the taper fingers of Egypt’s queen drew a pinch of Princess’ Mixture or Taddy’s Violet, gazing with loving eyes on Antony the while. In those remote times the hemp and the poppy were not unknown; and there is reason for believing that in Egypt the former was used as a potion for soothing and dispelling care.

Herodotus informs us that the Scythians cultivated hemp, and converted it into linen cloth, resembling that made from flax; and he adds also, that “when, therefore, the Scythians have taken some seed of this hemp, they creep under the cloths, and then put the seed on the red hot stones; but this being put on smokes, and produces such a steam, that no Grecian vapour-bath would surpass it. The Scythians, transported with the vapour, shout aloud.”[3] The same author also states that the Massagetæ, dwelling on an island of the Araxes, have discovered “trees that produce fruit of a peculiar kind, which the inhabitants, when they meet together in companies, and have lit a fire, throw on the fire as they sit round in a circle; and that by inhaling the fumes of the burning fruit that has been thrown on, they become intoxicated by the odour, just as the Greeks do by wine, and that the more fruit is thrown on, the more intoxicated they become, until they rise up to dance, and betake themselves to singing.”[4]

Homer also makes Helen administer to Telemachus, in the house of Menelaus, a potion prepared from nepenthes, which made him forget his sorrows.

“Meanwhile with genial joy to warm the soul,

Bright Helen mix’d a mirth-inspiring bowl;

Temper’d with drugs of sovereign use to assuage

The boiling bosom of tumultuous rage;

To clear the cloudy front of wrinkled care,

And dry the tearful sluices of despair;

Charm’d with that virtuous draught, the exalted mind

All sense of woe delivers to the wind:

Though on the blazing pile his parent lay,

Or a loved brother groan’d his life away,

Or darling son, oppress’d by ruffian force,

Fell breathless at its feet a mangled corse;

From morn to eve, impassive and serene

The man entranced would view the deathful scene.

These drugs, so friendly to the joys of life,

Bright Helen learn’d from Thone’s imperial wife,

Who sway’d the sceptre where prolific Nile

With various simples clothes the fatten’d soil.

With wholesome herbage mixed, the direful bane

Of vegetable venom taints the plain;

From Pæon sprung, their patron-god imparts

To all the Pharian race his healing arts.”

Pope’s Homer’s Odyssey, b. iv.

Diodorus Siculus states that the Egyptians laid much stress on the circumstance that the plant used by Helen had been given her by a woman of Egyptian Thebes, whence they argued that Homer must have lived amongst them, since the women of Thebes were celebrated for possessing a secret whereby they could dissipate anger or melancholy. This secret is supposed to have been a knowledge of the narcotic properties of hemp. The plant was known to the Romans, and largely used by them in the time of Pliny for the manufacture of cordage, and there is scarce a doubt that they were acquainted with its other properties. Galen refers to the intoxicating power of hemp, for he relates that in his time it was customary to give hemp-seed to the guests at banquets as a promoter of hilarity and enjoyment. Slow poisons and secret poisoning was an art with which the Romans were not at all unfamiliar. What the medium was through which they committed these criminal acts, can only be conjectured from the scanty information remaining. Hemp, or opium, or both, may have had some share in the work, since the poppy was sacred to Somnus, and known to possess narcotic properties.

The latter plant is one of the earliest described. Homer speaks of the poppy growing in gardens, and it was employed by Hippocrates, the father of physic, who even particularizes two kinds, the black and the white, and used the extract of opium so extensively, as to be condemned by his contemporary Diagoras. Dioscorides and Pliny also make mention of it; and from their time, it has been so commonly used, as to be incorporated in all the materia medicas of subsequent medical writers.

Plutarch tells us that a poison was administered to Aratus of Sicyon, not speedy and violent, but of that kind which at first occasions a slow heat in the body, with a slight cough, and then gradually brings on consumption and a weakness of intellect. One time when Aratus spat up blood, he said, “This is the effect of royal friendship.” And Quintilian, in his Declamations, speaks of this poison in such a manner as proves that it must then have been well known.

The infamous acts of Locusta are noticed by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal. This poisoner seems to have been a type of such a character as the traditions of a later age embodied in the person and under the name of Lucretia Borgia.

Agrippina, being desirous of getting rid of Claudius, but not daring to despatch him suddenly, and yet wishing not to leave him time sufficient to make new regulations concerning the succession to the throne, made choice of a poison which should deprive him of his reason and gradually consume him. This she caused to be prepared by an expert poisoner, named Locusta, who had been condemned to death for her infamous actions, but saved that she might be employed as a state engine. The poison was given to the emperor in a dish of mushrooms, but as, on account of his irregular manner of living, it did not produce the desired effect, it was assisted by some of a stronger nature. We are also further told that this Locusta prepared the drug wherewith Nero despatched Britannicus, the son of Messalina, whom his father, Claudius, wished to succeed him on the throne. As this poison occasioned only a dysentery, and was too slow in its operation, the emperor compelled Locusta, by blows, and by threatening her with death, to prepare in his presence one more powerful. It was first tried on a kid, but as the animal did not die till the end of five hours, she boiled it a little longer, until it instantaneously killed a pig to which it had been given, and this poison despatched Britannicus as soon as he had tasted it. For this service the emperor pardoned Locusta, rewarded her liberally, and gave her pupils, whom she was to instruct in her art, in order that it might not be lost.

The pupils of Locusta have not left us, however, the secret which their mistress confided to them. The demand made of the apothecary in “Romeo and Juliet” would have suited Nero’s case, in the latter instance.

“Let me have

A dram of poison; such soon speeding geer

As will disperse itself through all the veins,

That the life-weary taker may fall dead;

And that the trunk may be discharged of breath

As violently, as hasty powder fired

Doth hurry from the fatal cannon’s mouth.”

What connection the narcotic hemp had with the famous oracle of Delphi is not altogether certain, but it has been supposed, and such supposition contains nothing of heresy in these days, that the ravings of the Pythia were the consequences of a good dose of haschish, or bang. The non-classical readers will allow us to inform them, and the classical permit us to remind them, that the oracle at Delphi was the most celebrated in all Greece. That it was related of old, that a certain shepherd, tending his flocks on Mount Parnassus, observed, that the steam issuing from a hole in the rock seemed to inspire his goats, and cause them to frisk about in a marvellous manner. That this same shepherd was tempted to peep into the hole himself, and the fumes rising therefrom filled him with such ecstacy, that he gave vent to wild and extravagant expressions, which were regarded as prophetical. This circumstance becoming known, the place was revered, and thereon a temple was afterwards erected to Apollo, and a priestess appointed to deliver the oracles. This priestess of Apollo, Pythia, was seated over the miraculous cavity upon a tripod, or three-legged stool, and the fumes arising were supposed to fill her with inspiration, and she delivered, in bad verses, the oracles of the deity. During the inspiration, her eyes sparkled, her hair stood erect, and a shivering ran over the whole body. Under the convulsions thus produced, with loud howlings and cries, she delivered the messages, which were carefully noted down by an attendant priest. Plutarch states, that one of the priestesses was thrown into such an excessive fury, that not only those who came to consult the oracle, but the priests in attendance, were so terrified, that they forsook her and fled; and that the fit was so violent, that she continued several days in agony, and finally died. It has been believed that these fumes, instead of proceeding from the earth, were produced by the burning of some narcotic herb, probably hemp. Who shall decide?

In later times “bang” is referred to in the “Arabian Nights.” In one of the tales, two ladies are in conversation, and one enquires of the other, “If the queen was not much in the wrong not to love so amiable a prince?” To which the other replied, “Certainly, I know not why she goes out every night and leaves him alone. Is it possible that he does not perceive it?” “Alas!” says the first, “how would you have him to perceive it? She mixes every evening with his drink the juice of a certain herb, which makes him sleep so sound all night, that she has time to go where she pleases, and as day begins to appear, she comes to him again, and awakes him by the smell of something she puts under his nose.”

The Caliph Haroun al Raschid indulged too in “bang,” and although somewhere we have seen this word rendered “henbane,” we still adhere to the “bang” of the text, and think the evidence is in favour of the Indian hemp. Further accounts of the early history of this plant we will not however forestal, as it will occur more appropriately when we come to speak of it in particular. Henbane has been long enough known; but it has always had the misfortune either of a positive bad name, or no one would speak much in its favour, and therefore it has never risen in the world.

The lettuce, which has not been known to us three hundred years, was also known to the ancients, and its narcotic properties recognized. Dioscorides writes of it, and so also Theophrastus. It is referred to by Galen, and, if we mistake not, spoken of by Pliny. It was certainly wild, in some of its species, on the hills of Greece, and was cultivated for the tables of the salad-loving Greeks and Romans. It had been better that some of them had spent more of their time in eating lettuce salads, and by that means had less time to spare for other occupations of a far more reprehensible kind.

The “nepenthes” of Homer has already been shown to have found a representative in hemp. There have also been claims made for considering it as the crocus, or the stigmas of that flower known to us as saffron. Pliny states that it has the power of allaying the fumes of wine, and preventing drunkenness; and it was taken in drink by great winebibbers, to enable them to drink largely without intoxication. Its properties are of a peculiar character, causing, in large doses, fits of immoderate laughter. The evidence in favour of this being the true “nepenthes” is, however, we consider very incomplete, and not so satisfactory, by any means, as that given on behalf of the Indian hemp.

When the Roman soldiers retreated from the Parthians, under the command of Antony, Plutarch narrates of them that they suffered great distress for want of provisions, and were urged to eat unknown plants. Among others, they met with a herb that was mortal; he that had eaten of it lost his memory and his senses, and employed himself wholly in turning about all the stones he could find, and, after vomiting up bile, fell down dead. Attempts to unravel the mysteries of this plant have ended, in some cases at least, in referring it to the belladonna, a plant common enough in these our days, and known to possess poisonous properties of a narcotico-acrid character.

An analogous circumstance occurred in the retreat of the Ten Thousand, as related by Xenophon. Near Trebizond were a number of beehives, and as many of the soldiers as ate of the honeycombs became senseless, and were seized with vomiting and diarrhœa, and not one of them could stand erect. Those who had swallowed but little looked very like drunken men, those who ate much were like madmen, and some lay as if dying; and thus they lay in such numbers, as on a field of battle after a defeat. And the consternation was great; yet no one was found to have died; all recovered their senses about the same hour on the following day; and on the third or fourth day thereafter, they rose up as if they had suffered from the drinking of poison.

This poisonous property of the honey is said to be derived by the bees from the flowers of a species of rhododendron (Azalea pontica), all of which possess narcotic properties.

Supposing that blind old Homer—if ever there was an old Homer, and if blind, no matter—knew the secret of Egyptian Thebes, and the power of the narcotic hemp, and yet never smoked a hubble-bubble, it is of little consequence, except to the Society of Antiquaries, and certainly makes no difference to Homer now. Although Diagoras condemned Hippocrates for giving too much opium to his patients, we are not informed whether it was administered in the shape of “Tinctura opii,” or “Confectio opii,” or “Extractum opii,” or “Godfrey’s cordial,” or “Paregoric elixir.” The discovery would not lengthen our own lives, and therefore we do not repine. We think that we have some consolation left, in that we are wiser than Homer or Hippocrates in respect of that particular vanity, called “shag tobacco,” which, we venture to suggest, neither of those venerable sages ever indulged in during the period of their natural lives. And although Herodotus found the Scythians using, in a strange manner, the tops of the hemp plant, he never got so far as Kamtschatka, and therefore never saw a man getting drunk upon a toadstool. If he had ever seen it, he had never slept till he had told it to that posterity which he has left us to enlighten.

CHAPTER III.
THE “WOND’ROUS WEED.

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;

Raze out the written troubles of the brain;

And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff,

Which weighs upon the heart?”——Macbeth.

Amongst Mahometans, the following legend is said to be accepted as an account of the miraculous introduction of the “wond’rous weed” to the world.

“Mahomet, passing the desert in winter, found a poor viper frozen on the ground; touched with compassion, he placed it in his sleeve, where the warmth and glow of the blessed body restored it to life. No sooner did the ungrateful reptile find its health restored, than it poked forth its head, and said—

“‘Oh, Prophet, I am going to bite you.’

“‘Give me a sound reason, O snake, and I will be content.’

“‘Your people kill my people constantly, there is war between your race and mine.’

“‘Your people bite my people, the balance between our kindred is even, between you and me; nay, it is in my favour, for I have done you good.’

“‘And that you may not do me harm, I will bite you.’

“‘Do not be so ungrateful.’

“‘I will! I have sworn by the Most High that I will.’

“At the Name the Prophet no longer opposed the viper, but bade him bite on, in the name of God. The snake pierced his fangs in the blessed wrist, which the Prophet not liking, shook him off, but did him no further harm, nor would he suffer those near him to destroy it, but putting his lips to the wound, and sucking out the poison, spat it upon the earth. From these drops sprang that wond’rous weed, which has the bitterness of the serpent’s tooth, quelled by the sweet saliva of the Prophet.”[5]

Happy Moslem! you have solved the mystery, and your heart feels no doubt; but Christian dogs despairingly sigh for some revelation from the past, whether through history or tradition, of the first use of this plant. In vain we enquire who it was that first conceived and put in practice the idea of burning the large leaves of a weed, and drawing in the smoke to spit it out again? Who it was that discovered pleasure or amusement in tickling the nose with that “titillating dust” to enjoy the luxury of a sneeze, or find employment in blowing it out again? Ye shades of heroes departed, that hover around the pine-woods of the Saskatchewan, sail over the rolling prairies of Illinois, or roam along the strands of Virginia, tell us to what illustrious progenitor of Cree or Mohawk we are to accord the honour of a discovery more popular than any since the days when “Adam delved and Eve span?”

In default of the shades giving us the required information, we must resort to the faint footsteps which “the habit” has left imprinted on the sands of Time. Even the name by which it is called, has been disputed and even denied, as of right, belonging to tobacco. This word, Humboldt informs us, like the words savannah, maize, maguey, and manati, belong to the ancient language of Hayti or St. Domingo, and did not properly denote the herb, but the pipe through which it was smoked. Tobacco, according to Oveido, was indigenous in Hispaniola, and much used by the native Indians, who smoked it from a tube in the shape of the letter =Y=, the two branches being inserted in the nostrils, and the stem placed in the burning leaves. The plant was called the cohiba, and the rude instrument by which it was inhaled tabaco.

Other fabulous accounts of the origin of this mystic name, which opens the heart and hand of the savage more readily than that of gold, trace it to Tabacco, a province of Yucatan in New Spain, whence it is stated to have been first brought to Europe. Or affinity is claimed for it with the Island of Tobago, one of the Caribbees, where it grew wild in abundance. Or its derivation is traced to Tobasco, in the island of Florida. In Mexico it was called yetl, and in Peru sagri, meaning in those languages “the herb,” or the herb par excellence, worthy of superiority over all other herbs which the earth ever produced from her bosom.

It seems surprising that a vegetable production so universally spread should have different names among neighbouring people. In North America the Algonkin name is sema, and the Huron oyngoua, and the same dissimilarity exists in the languages of South-American tribes; the Omagua, petema; the Maypure, jema; the Chiquito, pâis; the Vilela, tusup; and the Tamanac, cavai. One would have expected to have found names with less variation among such neighbours. It might be urged, perhaps, that these are all independent ancient names given by each tribe to the plant before they became acquainted with the existence of their neighbours, and an evidence that its use was not derived from each other, nor from travellers passing among them. To these speculations the theorist is welcome.

There is little reason to doubt that tobacco is a plant indigenous to the New World. With the era, therefore, of Columbus, our knowledge of it will necessarily commence. When the Spaniards landed with that navigator in Cuba in 1492, they found the Cubans doing the same kind of thing as the voyager would now find them occupied in, making and smoking cigars. In the latter act, these Spaniards soon followed the Cuban example, as did those also who landed in 1518, with Fernando Cortez, in the island of Tobago, to a still greater extent. The honour of introducing this, the fairest of “the Seven Sisters of Sleep,” to European society and soil, is due, perhaps, to Hernandez, the naturalist, who brought the first seeds from Mexico (Humboldt states, from the Mexican province of Yucatan), in 1559, and conveyed them to Spain. About the same time some unknown Flamingo introduced the illustrious visitor to Portugal.

Of the introduction of tobacco into France, the more commonly-received opinion is, that the first seeds were sent to Catherine de Medici from Portugal in 1560, by Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to that country, and ever since it has borne as its generic name a memento of its patron. Other accounts attribute to Father André Thevet, or some friend of his, the honour of introducing the raw material to the most accomplished snuff-takers in Europe, and, perhaps, the first who ever indulged in it to any extent.

In Tuscany, tobacco was first cultivated under Cosmo de Medici, who died in 1574. It was originally raised by Bishop Alfonso Tournabuoni, from seeds received from his nephew, Nicolo Tournabuoni, then ambassador at Paris. After him it bore the name of Erba Tournabuoni, as in France it was called Herbe de la Reine. Very early, before 1589, the Cardinal Santa Croce, returning from his nunciature in Spain and Portugal to Italy, carried with him thither tobacco; but he can scarce claim the honour of its introduction, although the exploit was commemorated by Castor Duranti in Latin verse. Thus it would appear that this plant was brought from Mexico to Spain, whence it passed into France, and thence into Italy, during the early part of the latter half of the sixteenth century.

The first introduction of tobacco into England has been claimed for a trinity of valiant knights—Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, and Sir Walter Raleigh. In Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” it is said—“The exiles of a year had grown familiar with the favourite amusement of the lethargic Indians, and they introduced into England the general use of tobacco.” These exiles were brought home by Drake before Raleigh visited the New World, and the period for the introduction of tobacco into this country by Sir Francis, claims the date of 1560. For Sir John Hawkins’ introduction, the time has been fixed at 1565; whilst the earliest date assigned for its introduction by Sir Walter Raleigh is 1584, the same year in which a proclamation was issued in England against it. Humboldt states that the celebrated Raleigh contributed most to introduce the custom of smoking among the nations of the North. When Raleigh brought tobacco from Virginia to England, whole fields of it were already cultivated in Portugal. It was also previously known in France, where it was brought into fashion by Catherine de Medici. As early as the end of the sixteenth century, bitter complaints were made in England of this imitation of the manners of a savage people. It was feared, that by the practice of smoking tobacco, Englishmen would degenerate into a barbarous state.[6] The cultivation of this narcotic plant preceded that of the potato in Europe 120 or 140 years.

Camden, who informs us of these fears for the civilization of England, also states that Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London, a courtly prelate (who died in 1596), by the use of tobacco “smothered the cares he took by means of his unlucky marriage.” According to Aubrey, the pipe was handed from man to man round the table; and this bears, certainly, a great resemblance to the custom of the North-American Indians—the chief smoking two or three whiffs, then passing it to his neighbour, until from one to another it passes round the circle, and comes back to the first smoker again.

M. Jorevin, a Frenchman, who visited England in Charles the Second’s time, says that the women smoked tobacco as well as the men.

From England the practice of smoking was carried to the Continent. Dutch students were first taught the art of smoking at the University of Leyden by students from England; hence the greatest smokers in Europe derived their knowledge of the use of the pipe from the English.

Lilly, in his autobiography, informs us that when committed to the guard-room in Whitehall, he thought himself in regions far below, where Orpheus sang, and Pluto reigned, for “some were sleeping, others swearing, others smoking tobacco; and in the chimney of the room were two bushels of broken tobacco-pipes.” Good friend Lilly, what wouldst thou have thought of a visit to a Studenten Kneipe, where a crowd of students, amid fumes dense as a London fog in November, scream and growl the well-known song—

“And smokes the Fox tobacco?

And smokes the Fox tobacco?

And smokes the leathery Fox tobacco?

Sa! Sa!

Fox tobacco.

And smokes the Fox tobacco.

“Then let him fill a pipe!

Then let him fill a pipe!

Then let him fill a leathery pipe;

Sa! Sa!

Leathery pipe.

Then let him fill a pipe!”

And then perhaps—but let the reader enquire for himself of some descendant from the ancestors of the renowned Wouter Van Twiller, the worthy head of the long-pipe faction. In 1601, tobacco was carried to Java, whence it spread over the East. It was also conveyed to Turkey and Arabia in the beginning of this century. El-Is-hákee states that the custom of smoking tobacco began to be common in Egypt between the years of the flight, 1010 and 1012 (A.D. 1601-1603). And from Persian writers on Materia medica, it appears to have been introduced into India in A.H. 1014 (A.D. 1605), towards the end of the reign of Jelaladeen Akbar Padshaw. From India, tobacco probably found its way to the Malayan Peninsula and China; although Pallas, Loureiro, and Rumphius think that tobacco was known in China before the discovery of the New World, and that the Chinese tobacco plant is indigenous to that country.

From “Notes and Queries” we learn that “tobacco was first cultivated in this country at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, and that the natives did suck thereout no small advantage; and before the time of James II. the best Virginia was but two shillings the pound, and two gross of the best glazed pipes, and a box with them, three shillings and fourpence.” Tobacco became almost a necessary among the upper classes; nor could the parliamentary representatives of the city of Worcester be despatched up to town until the “collective wisdom” had smoked and drunk sack at the “Globe,” or some other hostelry. As early as 1621, it was moved in the House of Commons by Sir William Stroud, that “he would have tobacco banished wholly out of the kingdom, and that it may not be brought from any part, nor used amongst us.” And by Sir Grey Palmes, “that if tobacco be not banished, it will overthrow 100,000 men in England, for it is now so common, that he hath seen ploughmen take it as they are at the plough.” At a later period of the same century, so inveterate had the practice become, that an order appears on the journals of the House, “That no member in the House do presume to smoke tobacco in the gallery, or at the table of the House sitting at Committees.”

But tobacco did not come into general use in Europe without great and strenuous opposition. All kinds of weapons were called in requisition to stay its progress. Persuasion and force were alike essayed without effect. A German writer has collected the titles of a hundred different works condemning its use, which were published within half a century of its introduction into Europe. The pen was wielded by royal as well as plebeian fingers, and the famous diatribe of the British Solomon, King James I., of blessed memory, defender of the faith, and antagonist of tobacco, keeps his memory still green in the hearts of Englishmen. In Russia, the snuff-taker was ingeniously cured of the habit, by having his nose cut off, while smokers had a pipe bored through the same useful projection. Michael Feodorovitch Tourieff kindly offered a bastinado to the Muscovites for the first offence, cutting off the nose for the second, and the head for the third. In 1590, Pope Innocent XII. took the trouble to excommunicate all who used tobacco in any form in the church of St. Peter’s in Rome. And in 1624, Pope Urban VII., the old woman, fulminated a bull against all persons found taking snuff during divine service; and old women, in the spirit of opposition, have been fond of snuff ever since. The sultans and priests of Persia and Turkey declared smoking a sin against their religion. Amurath IV. of Persia published an edict, making the smoking of tobacco a capital offence. Shah Abbas II. punished such delinquents equally severely. When leading an army against the Cham of Tartary, he proclaimed that every soldier in whose possession tobacco was found, would have his nose and lips cut off, and afterwards be burnt alive. El-Gabartee relates, that about a century ago, in the time of Mohammed Básha El-Yedekshee, who governed Egypt in the years of the flight, 1156-8, it frequently happened that, when a man was found with a pipe in his hand in Cairo, he was made to eat the bowl with its burning contents. This may seem incredible, but a pipe bowl may be broken by strong teeth, particularly if it be of meerschaum. In Tuscany, the growth of tobacco was prohibited, except in a few localities, where it was allowed, under certain restrictions, from 1645 to 1789, when the Grand Duke Peter Leopold declared its cultivation free all over the country. Ferdinand III. afterwards restricted it to its former localities. The number of these were reduced in 1826, and in 1830 its growth was entirely prohibited. In Transylvania the penalty for growing tobacco was a total confiscation of property; and for the use of the weed, a fine of from three to two hundred florins. In 1661, the Canton of Berne introduced an eleventh commandment to the decalogue, and this was inserted after the seventh, “Thou shalt not smoke!” In 1719, the wise senate of Strasburg prohibited the cultivation of tobacco, fearing lest it should interfere with the growth of corn. Prussia and Denmark contented themselves with prohibiting its use. This brings us back again to England, and the days of “good Queen Bess.” That lady, who is said to have prohibited the use of tobacco in churches, according to certain chroniclers, was wont to banter Sir Walter Raleigh on his affection for his protégé. It is said, that on one occasion, when Raleigh was conversing with his royal mistress upon the singular properties of this new and extraordinary herb, he assured her Majesty that he had so well experienced the nature of it, that he could tell her of what weight even the smoke would be in any quantity proposed to be consumed. Her Majesty, deeming it impossible to hold the smoke in a balance, must needs lay a wager to solve the doubt. Raleigh procured the quantity agreed upon, he thoroughly smoked it, and weighed the ashes, pleading at the same time that the weight now wanting was the weight of the smoke dissipated in the process. The Queen did not deny the doctrine of her favourite, saying “that she had often heard of those who had turned their gold into smoke, but Raleigh was the first who had turned his smoke into gold.”

The Star Chamber levied a heavy duty, and Charles II. prohibited its cultivation in England. Tobacco was first put under the excise in 1789. It was not at first allowed to be smoked in ale-houses. “There is a curious collection of proclamations, &c.,” says Brand, “in the archives of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In vol. viii. is an ale-house licence, granted by six Kentish justices of the peace, at the bottom of which is the following item, among other directions to the inn-holder:——‘_Item._—You shall not utter, nor willingly suffer to be uttered, drunke, or taken, any tobacco within your house, cellar, or other place thereunto belonging.’”

Notwithstanding oppositions, imposts, anathemas, counterblasts, and persecutions, tobacco gradually and rapidly arose in popular esteem. The first house in which it was publicly smoked in Britain was the Pied Bull, at Islington; but this was “alone in its glory” for a very brief period of time. “Is it not a great vanity,” saith Royal James, “that a man cannot heartily welcome his friend now, but straight they must be in hand with tobacco? And he that will refuse to take a pipe of tobacco amongst his fellows is accounted peevish, and no good company; yea, the mistress cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco.” Raleigh smoked in his dungeon in the Tower, while the headsman was grinding his axe. Cromwell loved his pipe, and dictated his despatches to Milton over some burning Trinidado, or sweet-smelling nicotine. Ben Johnson affirmed that tobacco was the most precious weed that the earth ever tendered to the use of man. Dr. Radcliffe recommended snuff to his brethren. Dr. Johnson kept his snuff in his waistcoat pocket; and so did Frederick the Great. Robert Hall smoked in his vestry, and, it would seem, in other places as well, for Gilfillan informs us, that when on a visit to a brother clergyman, he went into the kitchen where a pious servant girl, whom he loved, was working. He lighted his pipe, sat down, and asked her—“Betty, do you love the Lord Jesus Christ?” “I hope I do, sir,” was the reply. He immediately added, “Betty, do you love me?” They were married. And Napoleon took rappee by the handful. And poets wrote, and minstrels sang, in the praise of the “Divine Virginia.”

“Thou glorious weed of a glorious land,

I would not be freed from thy magical wand—

Though a slave to thy fetters, and bound in thy chain,

Despairing of freedom, I cannot complain.

“Tobacco, I love thee—I bow at thy shrine!

The longer I prove thee, the less I repine.

The affection I cherish, no time can assuage—

Thy joys do not perish, like others, with age.”

The mailed Spaniard and red-plumed Indian have fought around it; and gold-seekers have drenched it with the gore of negroes. One whole continent has been enriched by it; and to cultivate it, another continent has been depopulated. Negroes have prayed to their Fetishes beside it—many a Cacique now dead smoked it at the war-council, and many a grave, grey-bearded Spaniard, who had fought at Lepanto, or bled in the Low Countries. Old soldiers of Cromwell have smoked it; and while Indians have bartered their gold for English beads, the swarthy Buccaneers looked on, handling their loaded muskets. Tobacco was for some time used as currency in Virginia, as, according to Mr. Galton, is the case now among the Damarás, Ovampo, and other tribes of South-Western Africa.

Forty varieties of tobacco have been described; but the differences are mainly the result of climate, and the mode of culture. It grows well in almost every part of the world. The northern limit in Scandinavia is 62°-63° N. L. The different parts of America in which it is grown include Canada, New Brunswick, United States, Mexico, the Western Coast, as far as 40° S. L. In Africa it is cultivated by the Red Sea and Mediterranean, in Egypt, Algeria, the Canaries, the Western Coast, the Cape, and numerous places in the interior. In Europe, it has been raised successfully in almost every country; in Hungary, Germany, Flanders, and France, it forms an important agricultural product. In Asia, it has spread over Turkey, Persia, India, Thibet, China, Japan, the Philippines, Java, and Ceylon. In parts of Australia and New Zealand. From the Equator to 50° N. L., it may be raised without difficulty. The finest qualities are raised between 15° and 35° N. L.

The most noted tobacco is that of Cuba; and the most extensive growers are the Americans of the United States. Two-thirds of our supply is doubtless derived from the latter source.

In 1665, Virginia exported to England 60,000 pounds. Twenty-five years afterwards, our total imports were double that amount; while in 1858, they amounted to 62,217,705 pounds, including snuff and cigars; hence, we may fairly calculate that, in Great Britain, eight millions of pounds sterling are annually spent in tobacco.

It has been computed that eight hundred millions of the human race are consumers of tobacco, and that the average annual consumption is 70 ounces per head. The total consumption would, therefore, approximate to two millions of tons. The average annual consumption of every male over eighteen years of age, in each of the following countries of Europe, as collected from returns, is, in Austria, 108 ounces; Zollverein, 156 ounces; Steurverein, including Hanover and Oldenburg, 200 ounces; France, 88 ounces; Russia, 40 ounces; Portugal, 56 ounces; Spain, 76 ounces; Sardinia, 44 ounces; Tuscany, 40 ounces; the Papal States, 32 ounces; England, 66 ounces; Holland, 132 ounces; Belgium, 144 ounces; Denmark, 128 ounces; Sweden, 70 ounces; and Norway, 99 ounces. In the United States of America, the consumption is 122 ounces; and in New South Wales, where there are no restrictive duties, it is declared to exceed 400 ounces.

“Jamie, thou shouldst been living at this hour,

Europe hath need of thee.”

To what a height of royal indignation the “Misocapnos” would have risen, had its author postponed its publication 250 years, and reappeared, a “new avater,” to see it through the press in these latter days. He had then required no Spanish matches to set him on fire; and the “horrible Stygian smoake” would have required the addition of all Catesby’s gunpowder to have made the simile worthy of its royal master, unless, peradventure, the weight of five millions of golden sovereigns from the Inland Revenue Office had pressed heavily upon his conscience, and he had purchased himself a new pair of silk stockings, and rested in peace; then he could have returned the old pair he borrowed in his Scotch capital, in which to meet his English Court at London.

Since the days when the green leaf of tobacco was used as a sovereign application for wounds and bruises and the bites of poisonous serpents, there has been no more singular use discovered for any part of this plant than that of certain African tribes, who, Denham says, “colour their teeth and lips with the flowers of the goorjee tree and the tobacco plant. The former, he saw only once or twice; the latter, was carried every day to market at Bornou, beautifully arranged in large baskets. The flowers of both these plants rubbed on the lips and teeth give them a blood-red appearance, which is there thought a great beauty.” That the poison of tobacco should have been turned to account is not surprising; and we are more prepared to hear of the bushmen of South Africa poisoning the heads of their arrows, not with nicotine, but with a poison taken from the head of the yellow serpent. These serpents they kill with the oil of tobacco, one drop or two producing spasms and death. Count Bocarmé effectually settled the question of the poisonous property of nicotine, some years since at Mons. It remained for future experimentalists to discover that as well as a bane, tobacco was an antidote.

A young lady in New Hampshire fell into the mistake of eating a portion of arsenic, which had been prepared for the destruction of rats. Painful symptoms soon led to the discovery. An elderly lady, then present, advised that she should be made to vomit as speedily as possible, and as the unfortunate victim had always exhibited a loathing for tobacco in any shape, that was suggested as a ready means of obtaining the desired end. A pipe was used, but this produced no nausea. A large portion of strong tobacco was then chewed, and the juice swallowed, but even this produced no sensation of disgust. A strong decoction was then made with hot water, of this she drank half a pint without producing nausea or giddiness, or any emetic or cathartic action. The pains gradually subsided, and she began to feel well. On the arrival of physicians, an emetic was administered. The patient recovered, and no ill consequences were experienced. Another case occurred a few years subsequent at the same place, when tobacco was administered and no other remedy. In this instance there was complete and perfect recovery. From this it may be reasonably concluded, that tobacco is an antidote of very safe and ready application in cases of poisoning by arsenic.

Financiers and Chancellors of Exchequers or Ministers of Finance, look with particularly favourable eyes upon the “Indian Weed.” Our own official in that department, can now calculate on nearly six millions of safe income in his estimates for a year, from this fertile source. Our near neighbours of France consider four millions too good an addition to the revenue, to denounce its use. Austria and Spain each manages to supply the state coffers with a million and a half of money from the tobacco monopoly. Russia, the Zollverein, Portugal, Sardinia, and the Papal States, individually realizes from three to four hundred thousands of pounds every year, from the use or abuse of this most popular plant in the world.

Although this habit, in its increase, may cause throbs of ecstatic joy in the breasts of certain officials, there are other sections of society holding antagonistic opinions. The Maine Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church at a late session, passed the following preamble and resolutions:——

“Whereas—The use of tobacco prevails to a prodigious extent in our country, as indicated in the reports of our national treasury, and other authentic documents, from which it appears that over 100,000,000 pounds of this article are consumed in the United States annually, at a cost to the consumers of over 20,000,000 dollars, and whereas, we have reason to believe that its use is rapidly increasing, and that even ministers of the Gospel are becoming, to a great extent, guilty of this debasing indulgence; therefore—

“I.—Resolved. That we view these facts as a matter of profound alarm, and such an evil as to demand the serious attention of the Church.

“II.—Resolved. That we regard the use of tobacco as an expensive and needless indulgence, unfavourable to cleanliness and good manners, unbecoming in Christians, and especially in Christian Ministers, and, like the use of alcohol, a violation of the laws of physical, intellectual, and moral life.

III.—Resolved. “That we will discountenance the use of that injurious narcotic, except as a medicine prescribed by a physician, by precept and example, and by all proper means.”

De Lagny states that the “Old Believers”, a sect of dissenters from the Greek Church in Russia, look with horror on the use of tobacco. The Wahhabees, a Pharasaical sect of strict Moslems, are rigid in their condemnation of tobacco, and in their adherence to the precepts of the Koran, and the traditions of the Prophet.

There are to be met with nearer home, those who are inveterate against its use, and who willingly join with Cowper in denouncing the

“Pernicious weed which banishes for hours,

That sex whose presence civilizes ours.”

An occasional pamphlet or letter, makes its way into the hands of speculative publishers or into class papers, giving gratuitous advice, and much denunciatory language, against a habit which is by far too general, and has been tested by too many experiments not to be well known, and equally well understood. These “counterblasts” differ but little from the model one which each would seem to aim at imitating—the quaint expressions, the only redeeming quality in the original, alone being wanting.

“Surely,” saith the high and mightie Prince James, “smoke becomes a kitchen farre better than a dining chamber; and yet it makes a kitchen oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soyling and infecting them with an unctuous and oyly kind of soote, as hath been found in some great tobacco takers, that after their death were opened. Now, my good countrymen, let us (I pray you), consider what honour or policie can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastlie manners of the wild, godlesse, and slavish Indians, especially in so vile and filthy a custome. Shall we, that disdain to imitate the manner of our neighbour, France (having the style of the greate Christian kingdome), and that cannot endure the spirit of the Spaniards, (their king being now comparable in largenesse of dominions to the greatest Emperor of Turkey), shall we, I say, that have been so long civill and wealthy in peace, famous and invincible in war, fortunate in both—we that have been ever able to aid any of our neighbours (but never deafened any of their ears with any of our supplications for assistance), shall we, I say, without blushing, abase ourselves so far as to imitate these beastlie Indians, slaves to the Spaniards, the refuse of the worlde, and, as yet, aliens from the holy covenant of God? Why do we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they do, in preferring glasses, feathers, and toys, to gold and precious stones, as they do? Yea, why do we not deny God, and adore the devils, as they do? Have you not, then, reasons to forbear this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received, and so grosslie mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof, sinning against God, harming yourselves both in person and goods, and raking also, thereby, the marks and notes of vanitie upon you, by the custom thereof, making yourselves to be wondered at by all forreine civill nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned; a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and, in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoake of the pit that is bottomless.”

Wise and worthy king, adieu. Gold stick, lead the way. We hasten from your royal presence to join the Cabinet of Cloudland.Vive la Virginie!

[CHAPTER IV.]
THE CABINET OF CLOUDLAND.

“A magnificent array of clouds;

And as the breeze plays on them, they assume

The forms of mountains, castled cliffs, and hills,

And shadowy glens, and groves, and beetling rocks;

And some, that seem far off, are voyaging

Their sunbright path in folds of silver.”

“Right,” said I to myself, as I lay down the volume of Hyperion, in which I had been glancing for repose. “I, too, have a friend, not yet a sexagenary bachelor, but a bachelor notwithstanding. He has one of those well oiled dispositions which turn upon the hinges of the world without creaking, except during east winds, and when there is no butter in the house. The hey-day of life is over with him; but his old age (begging his pardon) is sunny and chirping, and a merry heart still nestles in his tottering frame, like a swallow that builds in a tumble-down chimney. He is a professed Squire of Dames. The rustle of a silk gown is music to his ears, and his imagination is continually lantern-led by some will-with-the-wisp in the shape of a lady’s stomacher. In his devotion to the fair sex—the muslin, as he calls it—he is the gentle flower of chivalry. It is amusing to see how quickly he strikes into the scent of a lady’s handkerchief. When once fairly in pursuit, there is no such thing as throwing him out. His heart looks out at his eye; and his inward delight tingles down to the tail of his coat. He loves to bask in the sunshine of a smile; when he can breathe the sweet atmosphere of kid gloves and cambric handkerchiefs, his soul is in its element; and his supreme delight is to pass the morning, to use his own quaint language, ‘in making dodging calls, and wriggling round among the ladies.’” Yet there are a few little points in the picture which want retouching, and beyond all, one great omission to be remedied. It is the PIPE. What would the worthy Abbot be without his pipe? Just as uncomfortable as we should presume a dog to be without his tail. As incomplete as a sketch of Napoleon without his boots and cocked-hat. See him in a cloud, and he seems the very Premier of Cloudland. It was said of Staines, Lord Mayor of London, that he could not forego his pipe long enough to be sworn into office, without a whiff; and a print was published representing his lordship smoking in his state carriage; the sword bearer smoking—the mace bearer smoking—the coachmen smoking—the footmen smoking—the postilions smoking—and, to crown the whole—all the six horses smoking also. The ninth of November on which this event occurred, must needs have been a cloudy day.

Another cloudy day arose upon London when the great plague broke out, and on this occasion, the smoke of tobacco mingled with the gloom. In Reliquiæ Hearnianæ, it is stated that “none who kept tobacconist’s shops had the plague. It is certain that smoking was looked upon as a most excellent preservative, insomuch, that even children were obliged to smoke. And I remember”, continues the writer, “that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say, that when he was that year when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eton, all the boys of that school were obliged to smoke in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking.” We may imagine the experiences of some of these urchins at their first or second attempt, and in remembrance, it may be, of some similar experience of our own, see no cause for wonder at Tom Rogers not liking to elevate his yard of clay, and view the curls of smoke arise from the ashes of the smouldering weed. Another amateur who flourished after the great fire had burnt out all traces of the great plague, has left us the record of his “day of smoke,” and the cudgelling he received for doing that which Tom Rogers was whipped for not doing—

“I shall never forget the day when I first smoked. It was a day of exultation and humiliation. It was a Sunday. My uncle was a great smoker. He dined with us that day; and after the meal, he pulled out his cigar case, took a cheroot, and smoked it. I always liked the fumes of tobacco, so I went near him and observed how he put the cheroot into his mouth, the way he inhaled the smoke, how he puffed it out again, and the other coquetries of a regular smoker. I envied my uncle, and was determined that I would smoke myself. Uncle fell asleep. Now, thought I, here’s an opportunity not to be lost. I quietly abstracted three cigars from the case which was lying on the table, and sneaked off. Being a lad of a generous disposition, I wished that my brothers and cousins should also partake of the benefits of a smoke, so I imparted the secret to them, at which they were highly pleased. When and where to smoke was the next consideration. It was arranged that when the old people had gone to church in the evening, we should smoke in the coach-house. We were six in number. I divided the three cigars into halves, and gave each a piece. Oh, how our hearts did palpitate with joy! Fire was stealthily brought from the cook-house, and we commenced to light our cigars. Such puffing I never did see. After each puff we would open our mouths quite wide, to let the smoke out. At the performance of the first puff we laughed heartily—the smoke coming out of our mouths was so funny. At the second puff we didn’t laugh so much, but began to spit; we thought the cigars were very bitter. After the third puff we looked steadfastly at each other—each thought the other looked pale. I could not give the word of command for another pull. I felt choked, and my teeth began to chatter. There was a dead silence for a second. We were ashamed, or could not divulge the state of our feelings. Charlie was the first who gave symptoms of rebellion in his stomach. Then there was a general revolt. What occurred afterwards I did not know, till I got up from my bed next morning, to experience the delights of a sound flagellation. After that I abhorred the smell of tobacco—would never look at a cigar or think of it.” All this happened, as the narrator informed us, at the age of seven—an early age, some may imagine, who do not know that in Vizagapatam and other places on the same coasts, where the women smoke a great deal, it is a common thing for the mothers to appease their squalling brats by transferring the cigar from their own mouths to that of their infants. These youngsters being accustomed to the art of pulling, suck away gloriously for a second, and then fall asleep.

Howard Malcom states, “that in Burmah the consumption of tobacco for smoking is very great, not in pipes, but in cigars or cheroots, with wrappers made of the leaves of the Then-net tree. In making them, a little of the dried root, chopped fine, is added, and sometimes a small portion of sugar. These are sold at a rupee per thousand. Smoking is more prevalent than ‘chewing coon’ among both sexes, and is commenced by children almost as soon as they are weaned. I have seen,” he continues, “little creatures of two or three years, stark naked, tottering about with a lighted cigar in their mouth. It is not uncommon for them to become smokers even before they are weaned—the mother often taking the cheroot from her mouth and putting it into that of the infant.”

In China, the practice is so universal, that every female, from the age of eight or nine years, as an appendage to her dress, wears a small silken pocket to hold tobacco and a pipe.

The use of tobacco has become universal through the Chinese empire; men, women, children, everybody smokes almost without ceasing. They go about their daily business, cultivate the fields, ride on horseback, and write constantly with the pipe in their mouths. During their meals, if they stop for a moment, it is to smoke a pipe; and if they wake in the night, they are sure to amuse themselves in the same way. It may easily be supposed, therefore, that in a country containing, according to M. Huc, 300,000,000 of smokers, without counting the tribes of Tartary and Thibet, who lay in their stocks in the Chinese markets, the culture of tobacco has become very important. The cultivation is entirely free, every one being at liberty to plant it in his garden, or in the open fields, in whatever quantity he chooses, and afterwards to sell it, wholesale or retail, just as he likes, without the Government interfering with him in the slightest degree. The most celebrated tobacco is that obtained in Leao-tong in Mantchuria, and in the province of Sse-tchouen. The leaves, before becoming articles of commerce, undergo various preparatory processes, according to the practice of the locality. In the South, they cut them into extremely fine filaments; the people of the North content themselves with drying them and rubbing them up coarsely, and then stuff them at once into their pipes.

According to etiquette and the custom of the court, Persian princes must have seven hours for sleep. When they get up, they begin to smoke the narghilè or shishe, and they continue smoking all day long. When there is company, the narghilè is first presented to the chief of the assembly, who, after two or three whiffs, hands it to the next, and so on it goes descending; but in general, the great smoke only with the great, or with strangers of distinction. The Schah smokes by himself, or only with one of his brothers, the tombak, the smoke of which is of a very superior kind, the odour being exquisite. It is the finest tombak of Shiraz.

Mr. Neale says—“Talk about the Turks being great smokers; why, the Siamese beat them to nothing. I have often seen a child only just able to toddle about, and certainly not more than two years of age, quit its mother’s breast to go and get a whiff from papa’s cigaret, or, as they are here termed, borees—cigarets made of the dried leaf of the plantain tree, inside of which the tobacco is rolled up.”

In Japan, after tea drinking, the apparatus for smoking is brought in, consisting of a board of wood or brass, though not always of the same structure, upon which are placed a small fire-pan with coals, a pot to spit in, a small box filled with tobacco cut small, and some long pipes with small brass heads, as also another japanned board or dish, with socano—that is, something to eat, such as figs, nuts, cakes, and sweetmeats. “There are no other spitting pots,” says Kœmpfer, “brought into the room but those which come along with the tobacco. If there be occasion for more, they make use of small pieces of bamboo, a hand broad and high being sawed from between the joints and hollowed.”

In Nicaragua, the dress of the urchins, from twelve or fourteen downwards, consists generally of a straw hat and a cigar—the latter sometimes unlighted and stuck behind the ear, but oftener lighted and stuck in the mouth—a costume sufficiently airy and picturesque, and excessively cheap. The women have their hair braided in two long locks, which hang down behind, and give them a school-girly look, quite out of keeping with the cool deliberate manner in which they puff their cigars, occasionally forcing the smoke in jets from their nostrils.[7]

On the Amazon, all persons—men and women—use tobacco in smoking; when pipes are wanting, they make cigarillos of the fine tobacco, wrapped in a paper-like bark, called Towarè; and one of these is passed round, each person, even to the little boys, taking two or three puffs in his turn.[8]

The Papuans pierce their ears and insert in the orifice, ornaments or cigars of tobacco, rolled in pandan leaf, of which they are great consumers.

A Spaniard knows no crime so black that it should be visited by the deprivation of tobacco. In the Havana, the convict who is deprived of the ordinary comforts, or even of the necessaries of life, may enjoy his cigar, if he can beg or borrow it; if he stole it, the offence would be considered venial. At the doorway of most of the shops hang little sheet-iron boxes filled with lighted coals, at which the passer-by may light cigars; and on the balustrade of the staircase of every house stands a small chafing dish for the same purpose. Fire for his cigar, is the only thing for which a Spaniard does not think it necessary to ask and thank with ceremonious courtesy. If he has permitted his cigar to go out, he steps up to the first man he meets—nobleman or galley slave, as the case may be—and the latter silently hands his smoking weed; for it is impossible that two Spaniards should meet and not have one lighted cigar between them. The light obtained, the lightee returns the cigar to the lighter in silence. A short and suddenly checked motion of the hand, as the cigar is extended, is the only acknowledgment of the courtesy. This is never, however, omitted. Women smoke as well as men; and in a full railroad car, every person, man, woman, and child, may be seen smoking. To placard “no smoking allowed,” and enforce it, would ruin the road.

A regular smoker in Cuba will consume perhaps twenty or thirty cigars a day, but they are all fresh. What we call a fine old cigar, a Cuban would not smoke.

At Manilla, the women smoke as well as the men. One manufactory employs about 9,000 women in making the Manilla cheroots; another establishment employs 3,000 men in making paper cigars or cigarettes. The paper cigars are chiefly smoked by men; the women prefer the “puros,” the largest they can get.

The Binua of Johore, of both sexes, indulge freely in tobacco. It is their favourite luxury. The women are often seen seated together weaving mats, and each with a cigar in her mouth. When speaking, it is transferred to the perforation in the ear. When met paddling their canoes, the cigar is seldom wanting. The Mintira women are also much addicted to tobacco, but they do not smoke it.

In South America, many of the tribes are free indulgers in tobacco; and this extends also to the female and juvenile sections of the community. A story, which Signor Calistro narrated to Mr. Wallace whilst travelling in the interior of Brazil, shows that it was nothing but a common occurrence for little girls to smoke. This story is in itself interesting considered apart from all circumstances of veracity. “There was a negro who had a pretty wife, to whom another negro was rather attentive when he had an opportunity. One day the husband went out to hunt, and the other party thought it a good opportunity to pay a visit to the lady. The husband, however, returned rather unexpectedly, and the visitor climbed up on the rafters to be out of sight, among the old boards and baskets that were stowed away there. The husband put his gun by in a corner, and called to his wife to get his supper, and then sat down in his hammock. Casting his eyes up to the rafters, he saw a leg protruding from among the baskets, and thinking it something supernatural, crossed himself, and said, ‘Lord deliver us from the legs appearing overhead!’ The other, hearing this, attempted to draw up his legs out of sight; but, losing his balance, came down suddenly on the floor in front of the astonished husband, who, half-frightened, asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘I have just come from heaven,’ said the other, ‘and have brought you news of your little daughter Maria.’ ‘Oh, wife, wife! come and see a man who has brought us news of our little daughter Maria!’ then, turning to the visitor, continued, ’and what was my little daughter doing when you left?’ ‘Oh, she was sitting at the feet of the Virgin with a golden crown on her head, and smoking a golden pipe a yard long.’ ‘And did she send any message to us?’ ‘Oh, yes; she sent many remembrances, and begged you to send her two pounds of your tobacco from the little rhoosa; they have not got any half so good up there.’ ‘Oh, wife, wife, bring two pounds of our tobacco from the little rhoosa, for our daughter Maria is in heaven, and she says they have not any half so good up there.’ So the tobacco was brought, and the visitor was departing, when he was asked, ‘Are there many white men up there?’ ‘Very few,’ he replied; ‘they are all down below with the diabo.’ ‘I thought so,’ the other replied, apparently quite satisfied; ‘good night.’”

On the Orinoco, tobacco has been cultivated by the native tribes from time immemorial. The Tamanacs and the Maypures of Guiana wrap maize leaves around their cigars as did the Mexicans at the time of the arrival of Cortes; and, as in Chili, is done at the present day. The Spaniards have substituted paper for the maize husks, in imitation of them. The little cigarettos of Chili are called hojitas. They are about two inches and a half long, filled with coarsely powdered tobacco. As their use is apt to stain the fingers of the smoker, the fashionable young gentlemen carry a pair of delicate gold tweezers for holding them. The cigar is so small that it requires not more than three or four minutes to smoke one. They serve to fill up the intervals in a conversation. At tertulias, the gentlemen sometimes retire to a balcony to smoke one or two cigars after a dance.

The poor Indians of the forests of the Orinoco know, as well as did the great nobles of the Court of Montezuma, that the smoke of tobacco is an excellent narcotic; and they use it, not only to procure an afternoon nap, but, also to induce a state of quiescence which they call dreaming with the eyes open. At the Court of Montezuma the pipe was held in one hand, while the nostrils were stopped with the other, in order that the smoke might be more easily swallowed. Bernal Diaz also informs us, that after Montezuma had dined, they presented to him three little canes, highly ornamented, containing liquid amber, mixed with a herb they call tobacco, and when he had sufficiently viewed and heard the singers, he took a little of the smoke of one of these canes, and then laid himself down to sleep. A tribe of Indians originally inhabiting Panama, improved upon this method, which occupied both hands, and involved considerable trouble; the method adopted by the chiefs and great men of this tribe, was to employ servants to blow tobacco smoke in their faces, which was convenient and encouraged their indolence; they indulged in the luxury of tobacco in no other way.

Amongst the Rocky Mountain Indians, it is a universal practice to indulge in smoking, and when they do so they saturate their bodies in smoke. They use but little tobacco, mixing with it a plant which renders the fume less offensive. It is a social luxury, for the enjoyment of which, they form a circle, and only one pipe is used. The principal chief begins by drawing three whiffs, the first of which he sends upward, and then passes the pipe to the person next in dignity, and in like manner the instrument passes round until it comes to the first chief again. He then draws four whiffs, the last of which he blows through his nose, in two columns, in circling ascent, as through a double flued chimney; and their pipes are not of the race stigmatized by Knickerbocker as plebeian. None of the smoke of those villanous short pipes, continually ascending in a cloud about the nose, penetrating into and befogging the cerebellum, drying up all the kindly moisture of the brain, and rendering the people who use them vapourish and testy; or, what is worse, from being goodly, burly, sleek-conditioned men, to become like the Dutch yeomanry who smoked short pipes, a lantern-jawed, smoke-dried, leathern-hided race. The red people, whether of the Rocky mountains or of the Mississippi, belonged to the aristocracy of the long pipes. Let us hope that they have not degenerated, and become followers of the customs of the barbarian ultra-marines.

Turn over the leaves of “Westward Ho!” until you reach the end of the seventh chapter, and then read of Salvation Yeo and his fiery reputation, and his eulogium—“for when all things were made, none was made better than this; to be a lone man’s companion, a bachelor’s friend, a hungry man’s food, a sad man’s cordial, a wakeful man’s sleep, and a chilly man’s fire, sir; while, for stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach, there’s no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven.” The truth of which eulogium Amyas testeth in after years. But, “mark in the meanwhile,” says one of the veracious chroniclers from whom I draw these facts, writing seemingly in the palmy days of good Queen Anne and “not having (as he says) before his eyes the fear of that misocapnic Solomon James I. or of any other lying Stuart,” “that not to South Devon, but to North; not to Sir Walter Raleigh, but to Sir Amyas Leigh; not to the banks of the Dart, but to the banks of Torridge, does Europe owe the dayspring of the latter age, that age of smoke which shall endure and thrive when the age of brass shall have vanished, like those of iron and of gold, for whereas Mr. Lane is said to have brought home that divine weed (as Spenser well names it), from Virginia, in the year 1584, it is hereby indisputable that full four years earlier, by the bridge of Pulford in the Torridge moors (which all true smokers shall hereafter visit as a hallowed spot and point of pilgrimage) first twinkled that fiery beacon and beneficent loadstar of Bidefordian commerce, to spread hereafter from port to port, and peak to peak, like the watch-fires which proclaimed the coming of the Armada and the fall of Troy, even to the shores of the Bosphorus, the peaks of the Caucasus, and the farthest isles of the Malayan sea; while Bideford, metropolis of tobacco, saw her Pool choked up with Virginian traders, and the pavement of her Bridgeland Street groaning beneath the savoury bales of roll Trinidado, leaf, and pudding; and the grave burghers, bolstered and blocked out of their own houses by the scarce less savoury stockfish casks which filled cellar, parlour, and attic, were fain to sit outside the door, a silver pipe in every strong right hand, and each left hand chinking cheerfully the doubloons deep lodged in the auriferous caverns of their trunkhose; while in those fairy rings of fragrant mist, which circled round their contemplative brows, flitted most pleasant visions of Wiltshire farmers jogging into Sherborne fair, their heaviest shillings in their pockets to buy (unless old Aubrey lies) the lotus leaf of Torridge for its weight in silver, and draw from thence, after the example of the Caciques of Dariena, supplies of inspiration much needed then, as now, in those Gothamite regions. And yet did these improve, as Englishmen, upon the method of those heathen savages; for the latter (so Salvation Yeo reported as a truth, and Dampier’s surgeon, Mr. Wafer, after him), when they will deliberate of war or policy, sit round in the hut of the chief; where being placed, enter to them a small boy with a cigarro of the bigness of a rolling pin, and puffs the smoke thereof into the face of each warrior, from the eldest to the youngest; while they, putting their hand funnel-wise round their mouths, draw into the sinuosities of the brain, that more than Delphic vapour of prophecy; which boy presently falls down in a swoon, and being dragged out by the heels and laid by to sober, enter another to puff at the sacred cigarro, till he is dragged out likewise, and so on till the tobacco is finished, and the seed of wisdom has sprouted in every soul into the tree of meditation, bearing the flowers of eloquence, and, in due time, the fruit of valiant action.” And with this quaint fact, narrated in the bombastic style of chronicles, closeth the seventh chapter of the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, under the style and title already mentioned, and after which digression the course of our narrative proceedeth as before.

The inhabitants of Yemen smoke their well-loved dschihschi pipes, with long stems passed through water, that the smoke may come cold to the mouth; and which, when a few inveterate smokers meet together, keep up a boiling and bubbling noise, not unlike a distant corps of drummers in full performance.

In the Austrian dominions, the lovers of the pipe may be found amongst all classes of the community. Köhl writes, that after taking two or three pipes of tobacco with the pasha at New Orsova, he went into the market-place, where he found several merchants who invited him to sit down, and again he was presented with a pipe. From this place he went to a mosque, calling in at a school on his way:——“The little Turkish students were making a most heathenish noise, which contrasted amusingly with the quiet and sedate demeanour of their teacher, who lay stretched upon a bench, where he smoked his pipe, and said nothing.” He afterwards went to look at the fortifications, and here and there saw a sentinel, with his musket in one hand and pipe in the other. “Twenty-five soldiers were seen smoking under a shed, and on the ground lay a number of shells or hollow balls, which they assured us were filled with powder and other combustibles, yet the soldiers smoked among them unconcernedly, and allowed us to do the same.” A gentleman from Constantinople told him that he had seen worse instances of carelessness, in Asia Minor. He had there been one day in the tents of a pasha, where some wet powder was drying and being made into cartridges, and the men engaged in the work were smoking all the while.

In the “Stettin Gazette,” lately appeared a notification that the Prussian clergy had privately been requested by the higher authorities to abstain from smoking in public. We are not accustomed to it, and should certainly think it odd to see clergymen perambulating the streets with short pipes in their mouths.

In all parts of the Sultan’s dominions, the pipe or narghilè has a stem generally flexible, about six feet in length; and at this the owner will suck for hours. You may see a man travelling, mounted aloft on a tall camel, with his body oscillating to and fro like a sailor’s when he rows, but still that man has his two yards of pipe before him. You may see two men caulking a ship’s side as she lies careened near the shore. Up to their waists in water, they act up to the principle of division of labour; for one will smoke as the other plies the hammer, and then the worker takes his turn at the narghilè. Arabs sitting at work, fix their pipes in the sand. In the potteries both hands must be employed—how, then, can the potter smoke? Necessity is the mother of invention. One end of the pipe is suspended by a cord from the ceiling, the other is in the potter’s mouth.

In smoking, Lane informs us, the people of Egypt and other countries of the East draw in their breath freely, so that much of the smoke descends into the lungs; and the terms which they use to express “smoking tobacco,” signify “drinking smoke,” or “drinking tobacco;” for the same word signifies both smoke and tobacco. Few of them spit while smoking; he had seldom seen them do so.

It was something like drinking of smoke that Napoleon accomplished in his unsuccessful smoking campaign. He once took a fancy to try to smoke. Everything was prepared for him, and his Majesty took the amber mouth-piece of the narghilè between his lips; he contented himself with opening and shutting his mouth alternately, without in the least drawing his breath. “The devil,” he replied—“why, there’s no result!” It was shewn that he made the attempt badly, and the proper method practically exhibited to him. At last he drew in a mouthful, when the smoke—which he had discovered the means of drawing in, but knew not how to expel—found its way into his throat, and thence by his nose, almost blinding him. As soon as he recovered breath, he cried out—“Away with it! What an abomination! Oh! the hog—my stomach turns!” In fact, the annoyance continued for an hour, and he renounced for ever a habit which, he said, was fit only to amuse sluggards.

Although Napoleon managed to fail, thousands less mighty have managed to succeed. There is a curious kind of legend mentioned in Brand’s Antiquities, by way of accounting for the frequent use and continuance of taking tobacco, for the veracity of which he declares that he will not vouch. “When the Christians first discovered America, the devil was afraid of losing his hold of the people there by the appearance of Christianity. He is reported to have told some Indians of his acquaintance, that he had found a way to be revenged on the Christians for beating up his quarters, for he would teach them to take tobacco, to which, when they had once tasted it, they should become perpetual slaves.”

Without venturing to authenticate this strange story, in the moral of which Napoleon would have concurred—with a mental reservation in favour of snuff—after the above defeat, let us console tobacco lovers, that whilst the success of the first temptation closed the gates of Paradise, the success of the second opens them again.

The following from an old collection of epigrams is, in every respect, worthy of the theme.

“All dainty meats I do defie,

Which feed men fat as swine;

He is a frugal man indeed

That on a leaf can dine.

He needs no napkin for his hands

His fingers’ ends to wipe,

That keeps his kitchen in a box,

And roast meat in a pipe.”

In Hamburg, 40,000 cigars are smoked daily in a population scarcely amounting to 45,000 adult males. And in London, the consumption must be considerable to furnish, from the profits of retailing, a living to 1566 tobacconists. In England, we may presume that the largest smoker of tobacco must be the Queen, since an immense kiln at the docks, called the Queen’s pipe, is occasionally lighted and primed with hundredweights of tobacco, sea damaged or otherwise spoiled, at the same time blowing a cloud

“Which Turks might envy, Africans adore.”

The total number of cigars consumed in France in 1857 is stated to have been 523,636,000; and the total revenue of the French Government from the tobacco monopoly is estimated at £7,320,000 annually. In Russia the revenue is £7,200,000 annually; and in Austria near £3,000,000. These are large sums to pay for the privilege of puffing.

The Buffalo Democracy estimates the annual consumption of tobacco at 4,000,000,000 of pounds. This is all smoked, chewed, or snuffed. Suppose it all made into cigars 100 to the pound, it would produce 400,000,000,000 of cigars. These cigars, at the usual length, four inches, if joined together, would form one continuous cigar 25,253,520 miles long, which would encircle the earth more than 1000 times. Cut up into equal pieces, 250,000 miles in length, there would be over 1000 cigars which would extend from the centre of the earth to the centre of the moon. Put these cigars into boxes 10 inches long, 4 inches wide, and 3 inches high, 100 to the box, and it would require 4,000,000,000 boxes to contain them. Pile up these boxes in a solid mass, and they would occupy a space of 294,444,444 cubic feet; if piled up 20 feet high, they would cover a farm of 338 acres; and if laid side by side, the boxes would cover nearly 20,000 acres. Allowing this tobacco, in its unmanufactured state, to cost sixpence a pound, and we have 100,000,000 pounds sterling expended yearly upon this weed; at least one-and-a-half times as much more is required to manufacture it into a marketable form, and dispose of it to the consumer. At the very lowest estimate, then, the human family expend every year £250,000,000 in the gratification of an acquired habit, or a crown for every man, woman, and child upon the earth. This sum, the writer calculates, would build 2 railroads round the earth at a cost of £5,000 per mile, or 16 railroads the Atlantic to the Pacific. It would build 100,000 churches, costing £2,500 each, or 1,000,000 dwellings costing £25 each (rather small!) It would employ 1,000,000 of preachers and 1,000,000 of teachers, giving each a salary of £125. It would support 3⅓ millions of young men at college, allowing to each £75 a year for expenses.

What a cloud the “human family” would blow if they had each his share of the 4,000,000,000 pounds dealt out to him in cigars on the morning of the 25th of December, in the year of our Lord, 1860. One feels dubious as to the number who would refuse to take their quota, if there were nothing to pay.

Dr. Dwight Baldwin states, that in 1851, the city of New York spent 3,650,000 dollars for cigars alone, while it only spent 3,102,500 dollars for bread. The Grand Erie Canal, 364 miles long, the longest in the world, with its eighteen aqueducts, and eighty-four locks, was made in six years, at a cost of 7,000,000 dollars. The cigar bill in the city of New York would have paid the whole in two years.

The number of cigar manufactories in America is 1,400, and the number of hands employed in them 7,000 and upwards. The total estimated weekly produce of these manufactories is 17½ millions, and the yearly 840 millions. At 7 dollars per 1,000, these would be worth 5 million dollars, and adding 50 per cent. for jobber and retailer, the total cost to consumers would be 7½ million dollars—add to this the sum paid for imported cigars, 6 million dollars, and we have 13½ million dollars, the value of cigars consumed yearly in the United States, without adding profit to the imported cigars; so that, including the amount expended in tobacco for smoking and chewing, and in snuff, the annual cost of the tobacco consumed yearly, is not less than 30 million dollars or £6,000,000. This is but little more than is realized annually in Great Britain by the excise duty alone on the tobacco consumed at home; but it must be remembered, that in America tobacco is free of the duty of three shillings and twopence per pound, and free of charges for an Atlantic passage, so that the tobacco represented by 6 millions there, would be represented here by at least six times that amount.

Cloudland costs something to keep up its dignity after all, but beauty is seductive, and so is tobacco.

Yes! St. John (Percy, we mean—not “the Divine”), there must be “magic in the cigar.” Then, to the sailor, on the wide and tossing ocean, what consolation is there, save in his old pipe? While smoking his inch and a half of clay, black and polished, his Susan or his Mary becomes manifest before him, he sees her, holds converse with her spirit—in the red glare from the ebony bowl, as he walks the deck at night, or squats on the windlass, are reflected the bright sparkling eyes of his sweetheart. The Irish fruit-woman, the Jarvie without a fare, the policeman on a quiet beat, the soldier at his ease, all bow to the mystic power of tobacco[9]—all acknowledge the infatuations of Cloudland.

[CHAPTER V.]
PIPEOLOGY.

“It was his constant companion and solace. Was he gay, he smoked—was he sad, he smoked—his pipe was never out of his mouth—it was a part of his physiognomy; without it his best friends would not know him. Take away his pipe—you might as well take away his nose.”——Knickerbocker’s New York.

Semele, in a death by fire, became a martyr to love. Thus Virginia suffers herself to be burnt for the good of the world. From the ashes of the old Phœnix the young Phœnix was born. From the smoke of the Havana spring new visions, and eloquent delights. As the altars of the gods received honour from men, and the censers from whence ascended the burning incense were sacred to the deities, wherefore should not the pipe receive honour, as well as the man who uses it, or the odorous weed consumed within it. An enthusiast writes of it thus—“Philosophers have drawn their best similes from their pipes. How could they have done so, had their pipes first been drawn from them? We see the smoke go upwards—we think of life; we see the smoke-wreath fade away—we remember the morning cloud. Our pipe breaks—we mourn the fragility of earthly pleasures. We smoke it to an end, and tapping out the ashes, remember that ‘Dust we are, and unto dust we shall return.’ If we are in love, we garnish a whole sonnet with images drawn from smoking, and first fill our pipe, and then tune it. That spark kindles like her eye, is ruddy as her lip; this slender clay, as white as her hand, and slim as her waist; till her raven hair grows grey as these ashes, I will love her. This perfume is not sweeter than her breath, though sweeter than all else. The odour ascends me into the brain, fills it full of all fiery delectable shapes, which delivered over to the tongue, which is the birth become delectable wit.”

The instruments by which the “universal weed” is consumed, are almost as variable in form and material as the nations indulging in their use. The pipe of Holland is of porcelain, and that of our own island of unglazed clay. These latter are made in large quantities, both at home and abroad.[10] One factory at St. Omer employs 450 work-people, and produces annually 100,000 gross, or nearly fifteen millions of pipes; and another factory at the same place employs 850 work-people, and produces 200,000 gross, or nearly thirty millions of pipes, consuming nearly eight thousand tons of clay in their manufacture. The quantity of pipes used annually in London is estimated at 364,000 gross, or 52,416,000 pipes; it requires 300 men, each man making 20 gross four dozen per week, for one year, to make them; the cost of which is £40,950. The average length of these pipes is twelve and a half inches; and if laid down in a horizontal position, end to end together, they would reach to the extent of 10,340 miles, 1,600 yards; if they were piled one above another perpendicularly, they would reach 135,138 times as high as St. Pauls; they would weigh 1,137 tons, 10 cwts., and it would require 104 tons, 9 cwts., 32 lbs. of tobacco to fill them. In 1857 we imported clay pipes to the value of £7,614, which cannot be short of 121,000 gross, or seventeen and a half millions. But even with us, pipes were not always of clay. The earliest pipes used in Britain are stated to have been made from a walnut-shell and a straw. Dr. Royle describes a very primitive kind of clay pipe used by some of the natives of India—it is presumed only in cases of necessity. “The amateur makes two holes, one longer than the other, with a piece of stick in a clay soil, inclining the stick so that they may meet; into the shorter hole he places the tobacco, and applies his mouth to the other, and thus, as he lies upon the ground, luxuriates in the fumes of the narcotic herb.”

Turkish pipe-bowls, or Lules, are composed of the red clay of Nish, mixed with the white earth of the Roustchouck. They are very graceful in form, and are in some cases ornamented with gilding. The “regular Turk” prefers a fresh bowl daily; therefore the plain ones are resorted to on the score of economy. In Turkey and some other parts of the Orient, it is not unusual to compute distances, or rather the duration of a journey, by the numbers of pipes which might be smoked in the time necessary to accomplish it.

The pipe of the German is, almost universally, the Meerschaum, that pipe of fame so coveted by the Northern smoker. These articles are composed of a kind of magnesian earth, known to the Tartars of the Crimea as keff-til. Pallas erroneously supposed that this kind of earth was so denominated from Caffa, and therefore the name signified “Caffa earth.” From “Meninski’s Oriental Dictionary” it would appear to be a derivation of two Turkish words which signify “foam” or “froth” of the “earth.” The French name, écume de mer, or “scum of the sea,” and the Germans’ “sea foam,” have doubtless an intimate relationship with this same “keff til” of the Crimean Tartars.

Meerschaum earth is met with in various localities in Spain, Greece, Crimea, and Moravia. The greatest quantity is derived from Asia Minor, it being dug principally in the peninsula of Natolia, near the town of Coniah. Before the capture of the Crimea, this earth is stated to have formed a considerable article of commerce with Constantinople, where it was used in the public baths to cleanse the hair of women. The first rude shape was formerly given to the pipe-bowls on the spot where the mineral was dug, by pressure in a mould; and these rude bowls were more elegantly carved and finished at Pesth and Vienna. At the present time, the greater part of the meerschaum is exported in the shape of irregular blocks; these undergo a careful manipulation, after having been soaked in a preparation of wax and oil. After being finished, and sold at the German fairs, some of them have acquired such an exquisite tint through smoking, in the estimation of connoisseurs, that they have realized from £40 to £50.

Attempts have not been wanting to imitate this material, hitherto not very successfully. The large quantity of parings that are left in trimming up the bowls, has been rendered available for the manufacture of what are called “massa bowls,” but they do not enjoy the reputation of the genuine meerschaum bowls.

There is yet another mineral production, the use of which Turkish smokers, at any rate, know how to appreciate. This is amber. The Turk will expend an almost fabulous sum in an amber mouth-piece for his narghileh. Four valuable articles of this description were exhibited in the Turkish department of the Exhibition of 1851, which were worth together £1000, two of them being valued at £305 each. There is a current belief in Turkey that amber is incapable of transmitting infection; and as it is considered a great mark of politeness to offer the pipe to a stranger, this presumed property of amber accounts in some measure for the estimation in which it is held.

The knowledge of amber extends backwards to a remote antiquity, as the Phœnicians of old fetched it from Prussia. Since that period it has been obtained there uninterruptedly, without any diminution in the quantity annually collected. The greatest amount of amber is found on the coast of Prussia proper, between Konigsberg and Dantzic. From the amber-beds on the coast of Dirschkeim, extending under the sea, a storm threw up, on the 1st of January, 1848, no less than 800 pounds. The amber fishery of Prussia formerly produced to the king about 25,000 crowns per month. After a storm, the amber coasts are crowded with gatherers, large masses of amber being occasionally cast up by the waves. In digging for a well in the coal-mines near Prague, the workmen lately discovered, between the bed of gritstone which forms the roof of that mine and the first layer of coals, a bed of yellow amber, apparently of great extent. Pieces weighing from two to three pounds have been extracted. There are two kinds—the terrestrial, which is dug in mines, and the marine, which is cast ashore during autumnal storms.

Opinions vary as to the origin of amber. Tacitus and others have considered it a fossil resin exhaled by certain coniferous trees, traces of which are frequently observed among the amber, whilst other theorists contend that it is a species of wax or fat, having undergone a slow process of putrefaction; this latter view being based upon the fact that chemists are able to convert fatty or cerous substances into succinic acid by artificial oxidation. One thing is, however, certain, that amber, at some period of its history, must have existed in a state of fluidity, since numerous insects, especially of the spider kind, are found imbedded in it; and a specimen has been shown enclosing the leg of a toad. Toads are in the habit of living for centuries, we are informed, cooped up in stone and rock; but we are not aware that hitherto any of these extraordinary reptiles have been found buried alive in a mass of amber. Masses of amber have been found weighing from 4 lbs. to 6 lbs.—more than large enough to contain a toad or two of ordinary dimensions.

For a knowledge of the pipes of modern Egypt, we must resort for information to Mr. Lane, from whom we gather the following notes. The pipe (which is called by many names, as “shibuk,” “ood,” &c.) is generally between four and five feet long. Some pipes are shorter, and some of greater length. The most common kind used in Egypt is made of a kind of wood called “garmashak.” The greater part of the stick is covered with silk, which is confined at each extremity by gold thread, often intertwined with coloured silks, or by a tube of gilt silver; and at the lower extremity of the covering is a tassel of silk. The covering was originally designed to be moistened with water, in order to cool the pipe, and consequently the smoke, by evaporation; but this is only done when the pipe is old, or not handsome. Cherrystick pipes, which are never covered, are used by some persons, particularly in the winter. In summer, the smoke is not so cool from the cherrystick pipe as from the kind before mentioned. The bowl is of baked earth, coloured red or brown. The mouth-piece is composed of two or more pieces of opaque, light-coloured amber, interjoined by ornaments of enamelled gold, agate, jasper, carnelion, or some other precious substance. This is the most costly part of the pipe. Those in ordinary use by persons of the middle classes cost from £1 to £3 sterling. A wooden tube passes through it; this is often changed, as it becomes foul from the oil of the tobacco. The pipe also requires to be cleaned very often, which is done with tow, by means of a long wire. Many poor men in Cairo gain a livelihood by cleaning pipes. Some of the Egyptians use the Persian pipe, in which the smoke passes through water. The pipe of this kind most commonly used by persons of the higher classes is called “nargeeleh,” because the vessel that contains the water is the shell of a cocoa-nut, of which “nargeeleh” is an Arabic name. Another kind which has a glass vase, is called “sheesheh,” from the Persian word signifying “glass.” Each has a very long, flexible tube.

A kind of pipe commonly called “gozeh,” which is similar to the nargeeleh, excepting that it has a short cane tube, instead of the snake, and no stand. This is used by men of the lowest class for smoking both the “tumbak” or Persian tobacco, and the narcotic hemp.

The Zoolus of Southern Africa have a kind of pipe or smoking horn called “Egoodu,” which is constructed on a similar principle to the Persian pipe. The herb is placed at the end of a reed introduced into the side of an oxhorn, which is filled with water, and the mouth applied to the upper or wide part of the horn, the smoke passing down the reed and through the water.

The Delagoans of Eastern Africa smoke the “hubble-bubble,” a similar instrument, having the upper part of the horn closed, excepting a small orifice in the centre of the covering through which the smoke is inhaled.

The Kaffirs form pipe bowls from a black, and also from a green stone; they are in shape similar to the Dutch pipes, and without ornament. The negroes of Western Africa have pipes of a reddish earth, some of them of very uncouth and singular forms, others close imitations of European pipe bowls. One kind of pipe consists of two bowls placed side by side upon a single stem. Old Indian pipes have been found in America, also fashioned out of green stone.

The natives of the South-West coast of Africa, near Elizabeth’s Bay, use pipes in the shape of a cigar tube formed of a mottled green or white mineral of the magnesian family, externally carved or roughly ornamented.

Sailors, when on a voyage, are often in difficulties for the want of pipes. Under such circumstances, numerous contrivances have at different times been resorted to to remedy the defect; such as pipes cast out of old lead, or cut out of wood. The sailors belonging to H.M.S.Samarang having lost their pipes in the Sarawak river, set to, and in a very little while, manufactured excellent pipes from different sized internodes of the bamboos that grew around them. In India, simple pipes are used composed of two pieces of bamboo, one for the bowl cut close to a knot, and a smaller one for the tube.