as Puritans, denounce the use of tobacco. One or two of their writers
abused it roundly; but these were not representative of Puritan
feeling on the subject. The explanation doubtless is that the practice
of smoking was so very general and so much a matter of course among
men of all ranks and of all opinions, that the mouths of Puritans were
closed, so to speak, by their own pipes. A precisian, however, could
take his tobacco with a difference. The seventeenth-century diarist,
Abraham de la Pryme, says that he had heard of a Presbyterian minister
who was so precise that "he would not as much as take a pipe of
tobacco before that he had first sayed grace over it." George Wither,
one of the most noteworthy of the poets who took the side of the
Parliament, was confined in Newgate after the Restoration, and found
comfort in his pipe.

Some of the Puritan colonists in America took a strong line on the
subject. Under the famous "Blue Laws" of 1650 it was ordered by the
General Court of Connecticut that no one under twenty-one was to
smoke--"nor any other that hath not already accustomed himself to the
use thereof." And no smoker could enjoy his pipe unless he obtained a
doctor's certificate that tobacco would be "usefull for him, and
allso that he hath received a lycense from the Courte for the same."
But the unhappy smoker having passed the doctor and obtained his
licence was still harassed by restrictions, for it was ordered that no
man within the colony, after the publication of the order, should take
any tobacco publicly "in the streett, highwayes, or any barn-yardes,
or uppon training dayes, in any open places, under the penalty of
six-pence for each offence against this order." The ingenuities of
petty tyranny are ineffable. It is said that these "Blue Laws" are not
authentic; but if they are not literally true, they are certainly well
invented, for most of them can be paralleled and illustrated by laws
and regulations of undoubted authenticity.

Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, in her interesting book, abounding in curious
information, on "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," says that the
use of tobacco "was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on
the Sabbath within two miles of the meeting-house, which (since at
that date all the houses were clustered round the church-green) was
equivalent to not smoking it at all on the Lord's Day, if the law were
obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed, poor slaves of habit, who w