The use of tobacco spread with extraordinary rapidity among all
classes of society. During the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign
and through the early decades of the seventeenth century tobacco-pipes
were in full blast. Tobacco was triumphant.

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about smoking at this period, from
the social point of view, was its fashionableness. One of the marked
characteristics of the gallant--the beau or dandy or "swell" of the
time--was his devotion to tobacco. Earle says that a gallant was one
that was born and shaped for his clothes--but clothes were only a part
of his equipment. Bishop Hall, satirizing the young man of fashion in
1597, describes the delicacies with which he was accustomed to
indulge his appetite, and adds that, having eaten, he "Quaffs a whole
tunnel of tobacco smoke"; and old Robert Burton, in satirically
enumerating the accomplishments of "a complete, a well-qualified
gentleman," names to "take tobacco with a grace," with hawking,
riding, hunting, card-playing, dicing and the like. The qualifications
for a gallant were described by another writer in 1603 as "to make
good faces, to take Tobacco well, to spit well, to laugh like a
waiting gentlewoman, to lie well, to blush for nothing, to looke big
upon little fellowes, to scoffe with a grace ... and, for a neede, to
ride prettie and well."

A curious feature of tobacco-manners among fashionable smokers of the
period was the practice of passing a pipe from one to another, after
the fashion of the "loving cup." There is a scene in "Greene's Tu
Quoque," 1614, laid in a fashionable ordinary, where the London
gallants meet as usual, and one says to a companion who is smoking:
"Please you to impart your smoke?" "Very willingly, sir," says the