Sublime Tobacco

First edition 352pp illust. Compton Mackenzie smoked his first cigarette at the age of four. With this precocious puff as a starting point he relates his adventures with tobacco from that day to this. His prologue, entitled My Smoking Life, if followed by a history of the fragrant weed. The Stuarts hated smoking, but they were clever enough to realise its potentiality for Revebue. During most of the seventeenth century a miniature civil war went on in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, neither the Stuart Kings nor Cromwell being able to suppress those hardy men of the Cotswolds determined to grow tobacco in England. However, the tale of tobacco is not confined to England. One of the most interesting chapters deals with the success of Glasgow during the 18th century in making itself the tobacco Mart of the World. In Europe and Asia smokers were persecuted for a long time, and the tale of what they had to go through is fully related. The pipe from clay to briar, the defeat of the pipe in fashionable circles by snuff for over a hundred years, the defeat in turn of snuff by the cigar, and finally the rout of pipe, ciagr and snuff by millins of cigarettes. All these stirring events are told. Besides the social aspect of tobacco an adequate account of its cultivation is provided. When it is remembered that the foundations of the United States rest upon tobacco, the history of it is a matter of some importance. The book concludes with an Epilogue dealing with the benefit tobacco has been humanity.