Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

This experiment in the direction of wooden pipes was interesting, and deserves to be remembered; but it was not long before the briar was introduced and carried everything before it.

It was about 1859 that the use of the root of the White Heath (Erica arborea), a native of the South of France, Corsica, and some other localities, for the purpose of making tobacco-pipes was introduced into this country. The word "brier" or "briar" has no connexion whatever with the prickly, thorny briar which bears the lovely wild rose. It is derived from the French bruyère, heath—the root of the White Heath being the material known as "briar" or "brier," and at first as "bruyer." The Oxford Dictionary quotes an advertisement from the Tobacco Trade Review of so recent a date as February 8, 1868, of a "Heath Pipe: in Bruyer Wood." The briar pipe not only soon drove the clay largely out of use, but immensely increased the number of pipe-smokers. Bulwer Lytton may not have known the briar, but he wrote enthusiastically of the pipe. Every smoker knows the glowing tribute he paid to it in his "Night and Morning," which appeared in 1841. It is terser and more to the point than most panegyrics: "A pipe! It is a great soother, a pleasant comforter. Blue devils fly before its honest breath. It ripens the brain, it opens the heart; and the man who smokes thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

and taking the best and blackest bowl, and putting on Persian slippers, sitting on the softest couch, I will light my pipe, with my feet on the hearth, and I will cast aside all mortal care!
Nor must the delightful verses by "J.K.S." be forgotten, in which the author of "Lapsus Calami" sings of the "Grand Old Pipe"-

And I'm smoking a pipe which is fashioned
Like the face of the Grand Old Man;

and the quaint similarity or comparison between the pipe and Gladstone, the "Grand Old Man" when "Lapsus Calami" appeared in 1888, is maintained throughout-

Grows he black in his face with his labours?
Well, so does my Grand Old Pipe.
For the sake of its excellent savour,
For the many sweet smokes of the past
My pipe keeps its hold on my favour,
Tho' now it is blackening fast.


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