who is conversant with the manners of the Elizabethan times
as handed down in old plays.

"If Shakespeare's contemporaries were silent about the then
new fashion of smoking, we should not so much wonder at
Shakespeare's taciturnity. But Decker's and Ben Jonson's
works abound in allusions to tobacco, its uses and abuses.
The humorist and satirist lost no opportunity of deriding
the new fashion and its followers. The tobacco merchant was
an important person in London of James the First's
time--with his Winchester pipes, his maple cutting-blocks,
his juniper-wood charcoal fires, and his silver tongs with
which to hand the hot charcoal to his customers, although he
was shrewdly suspected of adulterating the precious weed
with sack lees and oil. It was his custom to wash the
tobacco in muscadel and grains, and to keep it moist by
wrapping it in greased leather, and oiled rags, or by
burying it in gravel. The Elizabethan pipes were so small
that now when they are dug up in Ireland the poor call them
'fairy pipes' from their tininess. These pipes became known
by the nickname of 'the woodcock's heads.' The apothecaries,
who sold the best tobacco, became masters of the art, and
received pupils, whom they taught to exhale the smoke in
little globes, rings, or the 'Euripus.' 'The slights' these
tricks were called. Ben Jonson facetiously makes these
professors boast of being able to take three whiffs, then to
take horse, and evolve the smoke--one whiff on Hounslow, a
second at Staines, and a third at Bagshot.

"The ordinary gallant, like Mercutio, would smoke while the
dinner was serving up. Those who were rich and foolish
carried with them smoking apparatus of gold or
silver--tobacco-box, snuff-ladle, tongs to take up charcoal,
and priming irons. There seems, from Decker's "Gull's
Horn-Book," to have been smoking clubs, or tobacco
ordinaries as they were called, where the entire talk was of
the best shops for buying Trinidado, the Nicotine, the Cane,
and the Pudding, whose pipe had the best bore, which would
turn blackest, and which would break in the browning. At the
theatres, the rakes and spendthrifts who, crowded the stage
of Shakespeare's time sat on low stools smoking; they sat
with their three sorts of tobacco beside them, an