askance at the reasonable use of
tobacco. "But used in moderation, what evils, let me ask,"--I again
quote Dr. Andrew Wilson's calm good sense--"are to be found in the
train of the tobacco-habit! A man doesn't get delirium tremens even if
he smokes more than is good for him; he doesn't become a debased
mortal; there is nothing about tobacco which makes a man beat his wife
or assault his mother-in-law--rather the reverse, in fact, for tobacco
is a soother and a quietener of the passions, and many a man, I
daresay, has been prevented from doing rash things in the way of
retaliation, when he has lit his pipe and had a good think over his
affairs. Whenever anybody counterblasts to-day against tobacco, I feel
as did my old friend Wilkie Collins, when somebody told him that to
smoke was a wrong thing. 'My dear sir,' said the great novelist, 'all
your objections to tobacco only increase the relish with which I look
forward to my next cigar!'"

XIII

SMOKING BY WOMEN

Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon;
They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.

ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE, _circa_ 1740.

A story is told of Sir Walter Raleigh by John Aubrey which seems to
imply that at first women not only did not smoke, but that they
disliked smoking by men. Aubrey says that Raleigh "standing in a stand
at Sir R. Poyntz's parke at Acton, tooke a pipe of tobacco, which made
the ladies quitt it till he had done." But this objection, whether
general or not, soon vanished, for, as we have seen in a previous
chapter, the gallant of Elizabethan and Jacobean days made a practice
of smoking in his lady's presence. It seems certain, moreover, that
some women, at least, smoked very soon after the introduction of
tobacco; but it is not easy to find direct evidence, though there are
sundry traditions and allusions which suggest that the practice was
not unknown.

There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked--with
unpleasant results. Campbell, in his "History of Virginia," says that
Raleigh having offered her Majesty "some tobacco to smoke, after two
or three whiffs she was seized with a nausea, upon observing which
some of the Earl of Leicester's faction whispered that Sir Walter had
certainly poisoned her. But her Majesty in a short while recovering
made the countess of Nottingham and all her maids smoke a whole pipe
out among them." The Queen had no selfish desire to monopolize the
novel sens