has overcome it. Germany has been puffing for threescore years; France smokes to a man. Do you think you can keep the enemy out of England? Pshaw! look at his progress. Ask the club-houses. I, for my part, do not despair to see a Bishop lolling out of the Athenæum with a cheroot in his mouth, or, at any rate, a pipe stuck in his shovel hat." And thus Bulwer discourses :-"He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation next to that which comes from heaven. 'What, softer than woman?' whispers the young reader. Young reader, woman teases as well as consoles. Woman makes half the sorrows which she boasts the privilege to soothe. Woman consoles us, it is true, while we are young and handsome; when we are old and ugly, woman snubs and scolds us. the whole, then, woman in this scale, the weed in that : Jupiter, hang out thy balance, and weigh them both; and if thou give the preference to woman, all I can say is, the next time Juno ruffles thee-O Jupiter, try the weed!" On CHAPTER IV. TOBACCO-PIPES, CIGARS, AND THE SMOKER'S THE "Fairy pipe" of Ireland may be safely accepted as the most ancient form of the tobacco-pipe used in the British Islands. This popular name with the Irish peasant is sometimes changed for that of “Danes' pipes." The Scottish peasantry, with the same feeling, term these minute receptacles for tobacco “Elfin pipes;" and with equal desire to antedate their history, call them also "Celtic pipes." This popular love for associating old things with the most ancient times, or with supernatural beings, is equally the result of a love of the marvellous, inherent in vulgar minds. There are also persons of a poetic temperament, who by no means deserve to be classed among these; but who, from their mental conformation, prefer poetic dreams to prosy realities, and who find no difficulty in believing an assertion that upsets a generally received fact, in preference to the fact itself if supported by a hundred proofs, any one of which is stronger than those on which they build their theories. Such persons have not scrupled to do battle for vulgar tradition; and have fought lustily for the Celtic and Danish origin of tobacco-pipes; and might, with equal consistency, have asserted their superhuman origin, as the works of the Irish Fairies. Why make possibility the limit for ingenious speculation, which has outstripped all probability? Once "out of bounds," the poetic tendencies of some Irish antiquaries carried them to the goal of their wishes with a wondrous, and to them, a satisfactory rapidity. In 1784, a short pipe was asserted to have been found sticking in the mouth of the skull of an ancient Milesian, at Bannockstown in Kildare. A learned paper at once appeared in the Anthologia Hibernica, parading it as a relic proving the use of tobacco ages before Ireland was invaded by the Danes. Fortunately a representation of the pipe has been preserved, and in structure it is identical with the Elizabethan pipe. are conversant with the singular idiosyncrasies of some writers, can form an idea how far they allow their imaginations to carry them away, and fortify their theories by a display of misplaced erudition which is but a reductio ad absurdum after all. It is precisely thus, with the pipe theory.* There is no doubt that tobacco-pipes have been found in connection with early remains in England, Ireland, and Scotland ;– but so have many other things of undoubtedly recent Only those persons who * Dr. Cleland dismisses the subject at once by saying "the absurdities written about pipes found in Ireland need not be adverted to." origin. We may not be able to account for the fact, but the fact remains— "The thing we know is neither rich nor rare, Tobacco-stoppers of the age of George II. have been found with Roman remains in England, and engraved as Roman bronzes. Copper coins, from Charles II. downwards, have been found at great depths in the ground, and mixed with Roman remains. One mode of accounting for this may be in the facilities afforded for burial by deep fissures in seasons of drought, or holes of rabbits, rats, or moles; another in the results of the constant turning of the earth by the plough; and the fact that Roman antiquities are sometimes a very short distance below the surface; and another, and probably the best solution, that in all excavations the ground from the sides rolls down to the centre, and reveals for the first time, at the bottom of a hole, that which came from the top. We may be certain, that no authenticated discovery of Celtic or Roman antiquities, where the ground has been entirely undisturbed, includes tobacco-pipes. Sometimes these advocates for ancient smoking prove too much. Thus when the Turkish traveller Eulia Effendi assures us he found a tobacco-pipe imbedded in the wall of an edifice constructed before the birth of Mahomet; his desire to "make assurance doubly sure" by declaring it still retained the smell of tobacco smoke, leads us to conclude with the author of a paper in the Quarterly Review, No. XXV.," that smoking having at first been prohibited to the Mahommedans as an innovation, and contrary to the principle of their law; the pipe had probably been inserted in the wall by some lover of tobacco, in order to furnish an argument for the antiquity of the custom, and therefore of its lawfulness." Attempts of another kind have been unblushingly made. "The Koran has been appealed to, and its modern versions even furnish the American name. A traditional prophecy of Mahomet is also quoted by Sale, which, while it contradicts the assumed. existence of tobacco in his time, foretells that:-'in the latter days there shall be men bearing the name of Moslem, but not really such, and they shall smoke a certain weed which shall be called tobacco!' * If the prophecy did not bear on the face of it such unmistakable evidence of being the invention of some Moslem ascetic of later times, it would furnish no bad proof of Mahomet's right to the title of false prophet; for Sale quotes in the same preliminary discourse to his edition of the Koran, the Persian proverb, ‘Coffee without tobacco is meat without salt.'" Such are the words of Dr. Wilson,t who, with Dr. Bruce, seems at one time to have been somewhat doubtful of the origin of the pipes found in Scotland and England,‡ but which doubts both gentlemen have dispelled by * Sale's Koran, 8vo, Lond., 1812, p. 164. In his pamphlet already alluded to, p. 34. See Dr. Bruce's volume, descriptive of the Roman Wall extending from the Tyne to the Solway. 2nd edition, 1853, p. 441. |