1560; Raleigh's agents in 1584 discovered
Virginia. Shakespeare did not die till 1616: that
is, fifty-six years from the time when the first
pipe was smoked in France; yet he never
mentions smoking, or makes any allusion to
it. Whereas his friend, Ben Jonson, wrote
Every Man in his Humour in 1596, and in that
play the fashionable smoker of the day figures
largely; "drinking" tobacco, as the phrase
ran, and discussing the virtues of a pipe with
appreciation. No one sketched his own age
more minutely than Shakespeare. Often he
scaled and clambered among the far Alp peaks
of the ideal world; but his daily life was spent,
watchfully and shrewdly, in Cheap and at
Ludgate, in "Paul's" and at Whitehall. His
Mercutio uses his rapier, his pages are euphuists, his
serving-men steal and wrangle, as serving-men
then did. Parolles was just one of those bragging
swindlers who then hung about London.

The new solution of Shakespeare's silence is
this: that he was a prudent manager, who had no
wish to rub the royal hair the wrong way. King
James had set his face dead against the new
fashion—nay, had even roused himself to write
against it. He had proved it, with much
dogmatic learning, to be unsuitable to a gentleman,
a father, and a husband: uncourteous, uncitizen-
like, the smoke thereof being like that of Tophet,
"noxious, hateful, and abominable." How could
Shakespeare praise smoking in the face of the
royal counterblast? How could he, on the
other hand, condemn it, if he loved tobacco's
balmy and care-dispelling fumes? In this
dilemma, he acted like a wise man and held his
tongue. Had not Chapman, the translator of
Homer, and Marston, the bitter satirist, and
his own friend, protégé, and boon companion,
Ben Jonson, got themselves into trouble by
sneering at the Scotch tendency southward?
Had not the executioner almost lifted his open
shears towards their indiscreet ears and noses,
and was he, Shakespeare, going to risk his
cherished house at Stratford, for the sake of
indulging the petulance of the moment? Not he.

Still, in spite of the king, the Elizabethan
fop, truly a tremendous truculent fellow,
with his wheel ruff, larger than any soup-
plate; his Venetian doublet, pounced, slashed,
and tagged; his hat plumed, brooched, and
jewelled; his scented mustachios curling up
to his eyes; smoked on with the doggedness of
one insensible to arguments. He was choice
in his tobaccos, had silver tongs in which
his page brought him red-hot charcoal to light
his small pipe, which he loved to discuss seated
on the stage during the acting of Twelfth Night,
or Much Ado about Nothing, the White Devil,
or Tu Quoque. He resorted to the most
fashionable apothecary to have his Nicotine minced
on a juniper chopping-block, or to receive
lessons from his professor in the art of "drinking
tobacco," studying how best to perform those
extraordinary feats, "the Euripus," "the rings
in the air," "the flying globes." "The wood-
cock's head," as the pipe was then called, was
as indispensable as the sword.

Dust and ashes (there goes the little white
column of ash from the end of my cigar, down
in a shower on the golden disk of a dandelion)!
Smokers of centuries past, ye are gone, like the
blue fume that has just passed from between
my lips. Grave caciques, plumed with toucan
feathers, smoking under the crimson jungle of
cactus-flowers, while the humming-birds flittered
round you like flying jewels, ye all are gone to
dust, like the weed ye burned. Thoughtful Jean
Nicot, leaning over the gunwale of the caravel
laden with oranges that bears thee back to
France, watching the dolphins leap and roll
before the frothing keel, thou too art exhaled;
Raleigh, shining in white satin and pearls in
the turret of Durham House, thou also art dust.
Dust likewise the solid men who fought in the
ranks of the Ironsides, and on the evenings of
Naseby and Dunbar sat pipe in hand under the
woodside, singing sullen hymns, or listening to
some grim preacher. Dust, too, Marlborough's
tobacco-loving and grimly swearing grenadiers;
dust, too, Frederick the Great's sharpshooters
and Pandour-slaying dragoons. Dust, all dust!
World, spin on while thou mayst, for thou, too,
like the sun, art but glorified and coloured dust.
We all do fade as doth this leaf, and turn to
ashes like this weed!

The beech-tree over my head protests against
this dust to dust theory, and with its thousand
restless tongues tells me I am morbidly insisting
on painful truisms that should not always be
insisted on, since happiness is as real and actual
as unhappiness, and better worth contemplating
on a sunny morning. Look at the sky, how
soft and blue it is—is that dust? See that
scarlet geranium in the flower-bed at my foot,
how it fires in the sunshine—is that dust? Yes,
I am but dust in one shape, looking at dust in
another shape, but I think well of it. What
does the flower think of me? Does it think
me beautiful, I wonder? I hope so, but I
rather doubt it.

Strange custom this to obtain a hold over a
busy age: this blowing of smoke from a little
light roll formed of the leaves of a West
Indian weed—the root of all evil, discovered
in a distant island by Columbus and his
immediate followers. For centuries it lay there
unheeded. Socrates never smoked, nor Noah,
nor the Pharaohs, nor Chaucer, nor Dante."
(Gracious Heavens! how Dante would have
brooded over a pipe, and seen in its smoke
cycles of Paradise and abysses of its Antipodes!)
The world seems, from all accounts, to have
done very well through some few thousand years
without a pipe. Physiologists, anatomists, tell
me what good tobacco does to any man? Some
say smoking tends to produce blindness (this is
the last and most comfortable theory). It
slackens the circulation, it retards the brain
and the pulse, and it checks the heart; it lessens
the nervous activity. So say its enemies. But
very well, reply its friends; it helps digestion, it
soothes the nerves, it aids reflection, it calms,
it quiets, it comforts.

Haters of the consecrated weed, did you