's Walk in the old cathedral, he might look into
the booksellers' shops, and, pipe in mouth, inquire for the most
recent attack upon the "divine weed"--the contemporary tobacco
literature was abundant--or drop into an apothecary's, which was
usually a tobacco-shop also, and there meet his fellow-smokers.

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."

An amusing example of the bragging "tobacconist" is pictured for us in
Ben Jonson's "Bobadil." Bobadil may perhaps be somewhat of an
exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in
drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many
smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from his pocket,
declares that it is all that is left of seven pounds which he had
bought only "yesterday was seven-night." A consumption of seven pounds
of tobacco in eight days is a pretty "tall order"! Then he goes on to
brag of its quality--your right Trinidado--and to assert that he had
been in the Indies, where the herb grows, and where he himself and a
dozen other gentlemen had for the space of one-and-twenty weeks known
no other nutriment than the fume of tobacco. This again was tolerably
"steep" even for this Falstaff-like braggart. He continues with more
bombast in praise of the medicinal virtues of the herb--virtues which
were then very firmly and widely believed in--and is replied to by
Cob, the anti-tobacconist, who, with equal exaggeration on the other
side, denounces tobacco, and declares that four people had died in one
house from the use of it in the preceding week, and that one had
"voided a bushel of soot"!

The properly accomplished gallant not only professed to be curiously
learned in pipes and tobacco, but his knowledge of prices and their
fluctuations, of the apothecaries' and other shops where the herb was
sold, and of the latest and most fashionable ways of inhaling and
exhaling the smoke, was, like Mr. Weller's