Of Dr. Aldrich, who was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and who wrote a
curious "Catch not more difficult to sing than diverting to hear, to
be sung by four men smoaking their pipes," an anecdote has often been
related, which illustrates his devotion to the weed. A bet was made by
one undergraduate and taken by another, that at whatever time, however
early, the Dean might be visited in his own den, he would be found
smoking. As soon as the bet had been made the Dean was visited. The
pair explained the reason for their call, when Aldrich, who must have
been a good-tempered man, said, "Your friend has lost: I am not
smoking, only filling my pipe."

John Philips, the author of "Cyder" and the "Splendid Shilling," was
an undergraduate at Christ Church, during Aldrich's term of office,
and no doubt learned to smoke in an atmosphere so favourable to
tobacco. In his "Splendid Shilling," which dates from about 1700,
Philips says of the happy man with a shilling in his pocket:

_Meanwhile, he smokes, and laughs at merry tale,
Or Pun ambiguous or Conundrum quaint._

But the poor shillingless wretch can only

_doze at home
In garret vile, and with a warming puff
Regale chill'd fingers; or from tube as black
As winter-chimney, or well-polish'd jet,
Exhale Mundungus, ill-perfuming scent._

The miserable creature, though without a shilling, yet possessed a
well-coloured "clay."

It is significant that the writer of a life of Philips, which was
prefixed to an edition of his poems which was published in 1762, after
mentioning that smoking was common at Oxford in the days of Aldrich,
says apologetically, "It is no wonder therefore that he [Philips] fell
in with the general taste ... he has descended to sing its praises in
more than one place." By 1762, as we shall see, smoking was quite
unfashionable, and consequently it was necessary to explain how it was
that a poet could "descend" so low as to sing the praises of tobacco.

Other well-known men of the late seventeenth century were
"tobacconists" in the old sense of the word. Sir Isaac Newton is said
to have smoked immoderately; and a familiar anecdote represents him as
using for the purposes of a tobacco-stopper, in a fit of
absent-mindedness, the little finger of a lady sitting beside him,
whom he admired, but the truth of this legend is open to doubt. Thomas
Hobbes, who lived to be ninety (1588-1679), was accustomed to di