haps this terrible picture of a ploughman smoking as he
followed his lonely furrow did not impress the House so much as Sir
Grey evidently thought it would; at all events, tobacco was not
banished.

Peers and squires and parsons and peasants alike smoked. The parson of
Thornton, in Buckinghamshire, was so devoted to tobacco that when his
supply of the weed ran short, he is said to have cut up the bell-ropes
and smoked them! This is dated about 1630. In the well-known
description of the famous country squire, Mr. Hastings, who was
remarkable for keeping up old customs in the early years of the
seventeenth century, we read of how his hall tables were littered with
hawks' hoods, bells, old hats with their crowns thrust in, full of
pheasants' eggs; tables, dice, cards, and store of tobacco-pipes.

Sir Francis Vere, in the account of his services by sea and land which
he wrote about 1606, mentions that on an expedition to the Azores in
1597, the Earl of Essex, waiting for news of the enemy at St. Michael,
"called for tobacco ... and so on horseback, with those Noblemen and
Gentlemen on foot beside him, took tobacco, whilst I was telling his
Lordship of the men I had sent forth, and orders I had given."
Presently came the sound of guns, which "made his Lordship cast his
pipe from him, and listen to the shooting."

Another famous nobleman, Lord Herbert of Cherbury--

_All-virtuous Herbert! on whose every part
Truth might spend all her voice, fame all her art!--_

was a smoker, as we know from a very curious passage in his well-known
autobiography. He appears to have smoked not so much for pleasure as
for supposed reasons of health. "It is well known," he wrote, "to
those that wait in my chamber, that the shirts, waistcoats, and other
garments I wear next my body, are sweet, beyond what either can easily
be believed, or hath been observed in any else, which sweetness also
was found to be in my breath above others, before I used to take
tobacco, which towards my latter time I was forced to take against
certain rheums and catarrhs that trouble me, which yet did not taint
my breath for any long time." The autobiography was written about
1645, so as Lord Herbert did not smoke till towards the latter part of
his life--he died in 1648--he clearly was not one of those who took to
tobacco in the first enthusiasm for the new indulgence.

When Robert, Earl of Essex, and Henry, Earl of Southampton, were tried
for high treas