From Chapter 3: This brief "Character" is hardly so pointed or so effective as some of the others in the "Micro-Cosmographie," but it would seem that the Bishop was not very friendly to tobacco. In the character of "A Drunkard" he says: "
Tobacco serves to aire him after a washing [
i.e. a drinking-bout], and is his onely breath, and breathing while." In another, a tavern "is the common consumption of the Afternoone, and the murderer, or maker away of a rainy day. It is the Torrid Zone that scorches the face, and Tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up."
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.
