[Illustration: A tobacco plant, with several birds standing nearby.]
Tobacco was introduced into Europe from the province of Tabaca in St.
Domingo in 1559, by a Spanish gentleman, named Hernandez de Toledo, who
brought a small quantity into Spain and Portugal. From thence, by the
means of the French ambassador at Lisbon, Jean Nicot from whom it
derived its name of Nicotia, it found its way to Paris, where it was
used in the form of a powder by Catherine de Medici. Tobacco then came
under the patronage of the Cardinal Santa Croce, the pope’s nuncio, who,
returning from his embassy at the Spanish and Portuguese courts, carried
the plant to his own country, and thus acquired a fame little inferior
to that which, at another period, he had won by piously bringing a
portion of the _real_ cross from the Holy Land. Both in France and in
the Papal States it was at once received with general enthusiasm, in the
shape of snuff; but it was some time after the use of tobacco as snuff
that the practice of smoking it commenced. This practice is generally
supposed to have been introduced into England by Sir Walter Raleigh; but
Camden says, in his ‘Elizabeth,’ that Sir Francis Drake and his
companions, on their return from Virginia in 1585, were “the first, as
far as he knew, who introduced the Indian plant, called Tabacca or
Nicotia, into England, having been taught by the Indians to use it as a
remedy against indigestion. And from the time of their return,” says he,
“it immediately began to grow into very general use, and to bear a high
price; a great many persons, some from luxury, and others for their
health, being wont to draw in the strong-smelling smoke with insatiable
greediness through an earthenware tube, and then to puff it forth again
through their nostrils: so that tabacca-taverns (tabernæ tabaccanæ) are
now as generally kept in all our towns, as wine-houses or beerhouses.”
No doubt the tobacco-taverns of Queen Elizabeth’s times were not
unworthy predecessors of the splendid cygar divans of the present day.
It appears from a note in the ‘Criminal Trials,’ vol i. p. 361, that in
1600 the French ambassador, in his despatches, represented the Peers, on
the trial of the Earls of Essex and Southampton, as smoking tobacco
copiously while they deliberated on their verdict. Sir Walter Raleigh,
too, was accused of having sat with his pipe at the window of the
armoury, while he looked in at the execution of Essex in the Tower. Both
these stories are probably untrue, but the mere relation of them by
contemporaneous writers shows that they were not then monstrously
incredible, and they therefore prove the generality of the practice of
smoking at that time amongst the higher class of society. After a time,
however, the practice of smoking tobacco appears to have met with
strenuous opposition in high places, both in this country and other
parts of Europe. Its principal opponents were the priests, the
physicians, and the sovereign princes; by the former its use was
declared sinful; and, in 1684, Pope Urban VIII. published a bull,
excommunicating all persons found guilty of taking snuff when in church.
This bull was renewed in 1690, by Pope Innocent; and, about twenty-nine
years afterwards, the Sultan Amurath IV made smoking a capital offence.
For a long time smoking was forbidden in Russia, under pain of having
the nose cut off; and in some parts of Switzerland, it was likewise made
a subject of public prosecution--the police regulations of the canton of
Berne, in 1661, placing the prohibition of smoking in the list of the
Ten Commandments, immediately under that against adultery. Nay, that
British Solomon, James I., did not think it beneath the royal dignity to
take up his pen upon the subject. He accordingly, in 1603, published his
famous ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco,’ in which the following remarkable
passage occurs:--“It is a custom loathesome to the eye, hatefull to the
nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black
stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of
the pit that is bottomless.” But notwithstanding this regal and priestly
wrath, the use of the plant extended itself far and wide; and tobacco
is, at this moment, perhaps the most general luxury in existence. The
allusion to the practice in the following lines, taken from the ‘Marrow
of Compliment,’ written in 1651, seems to show the prevalence of smoking
at that period:--
“Much meat doth Gluttony procure
To feed men fat as swine;
But he’s a frugal man indeed,
That on a _leaf_ can dine!
He needs no napkin for his hands,
His fingers’ ends to wipe,
That hath his kitchen in a box,
His roast meat in a Pipe!”
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