lants,' as the
dandies of that age were called. To wear a pair of velvet
breeches, with panes or slashes of silk, an enormous
starched ruff, a gilt handled sword, and a Spanish dagger;
to play at cards or dice in the chambers of the
groom-porter, and smoke tobacco in the tilt-yard or at the
play-house, were then the grand characteristics of a man of
fashion. Tobacconists' shops were then common; and as the
article, which appears to have been sold at a high price,
was indispensable to the gay 'man about town,' he generally
endeavored to keep his credit good with his
tobacco-merchant. Poets and pamphleteers laughed at the
custom, though generally they seem to have no particular
aversion to an occasional treat to a sober pipe and a poute
of sack. Your men of war, who had served in the Low
Countries, and who taught young gallants the noble art of
fencing, were particularly fond of tobacco; and your
gentlemen adventurers, who had served in a buccaneering
expedition against the Spaniards, were no less partial to
it. Sailors--from the captain to the ship-boy--all affected
to smoke, as if the practice was necessary to their
character; and to 'take tobacco' and wear a silver whistle,
like a modern boatswain's mate, was the pride of a
man-of-war's man.

"Ben Jonson, of all our early dramatic writers, most
frequently alludes to the practice of smoking. In his play
of 'Every Man in his Humour,' first acted in 1598, Captain
Bobadil thus extols in his own peculiar vein the virtues of
tobacco; while Cob, the water carrier, with about equal
truth, relates some startling instances of its pernicious
effects.

"'_Bobadil._ Body o' me, here's the remainder of seven pound
since yesterday was seven-night! 'Tis your right Trinadado!
Did you never take any, Master Stephen?

"'_Stephen._ No, truly, Sir; but I'll learn to take it since
you commend it so.

"'_Bobadil._ Sir, believe me upon my relation,--for what I
tell you the world shall not reprove. I have been in the
Indies where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a
dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge, have received the
taste of any other nutriment in the world, for the space of
one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only.
Therefore, it cannot be but 'tis mos