From Chapter 3: The druggist-tobacconists were well stocked with
abundance of pipes—those known as Winchester pipes were highly popular—with maple blocks for cutting or shredding the tobacco upon, juniper wood charcoal fires, and silver tongs with which the hot charcoal could be lifted to light the customer's pipe. The maple block was in constant use in those days, when the many present forms of prepared tobacco and varied mixtures were unknown. In Middleton and Dekker's "Roaring Girl," 1611, the "mincing and shredding
of tobacco" is mentioned; and in the same play, by the way, we are told that "a pipe of rich smoak" was sold for sixpence.
From Chapter 6: 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.