Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Some of the apothecaries whose shops were in most repute for the quality of the tobacco kept, took pupils and taught them the "slights," as tricks with the pipe were called. These included exhaling the smoke in little globes, rings and so forth. The invaluable Ben Jonson, in the preliminary account of the characters in his "Every Man out of his Humour," 1600, describes one Sogliardo as "an essential clown ... yet so enamoured of the name of a gentleman that he will have it though he buys it. He comes up every term to learn to take tobacco and see new motions." Sogliardo was accustomed to hire a private room to practise in. The fashionable way was to expel the smoke through the nose. In a play by Field of 1618, a foolish nobleman is asked by some boon companions in a tavern: "Will your lordship take any tobacco?" when another sneers, "'Sheart! he cannot put it through his nose!" His lordship was apparently not well versed in the "slights."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

In the afternoon the gallant might attend what Dekker calls a "Tobacco-ordinary," by which may possibly have been meant a smoking-club, or, more probably, the gathering after dinner at one of the many ordinaries in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's Cathedral of "tobacconists," as smokers were then called, to discuss the merits of their respective pipes, and of the various kinds of tobacco—"whether your Cane or your Pudding be sweetest."

Of course he often bragged, like Julio in Day's "Law Trickes": "Tobacco? the best in Europe, 't cost me ten Crownes an ounce, by this vapour."

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