GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 35 



use it did not become fashionable and general until a 

 little boy of that date had grown to manhood, and to 

 a position great enough to enable him to set the style. 

 Tradition has it that Sir Walter Raleigh's second at- 

 tempt at colonizing Virginia resulted in this much at 

 least: that gifts of the Indian's "implements" for us- 

 ing tobacco were brought home to him by Ralph Lane, 

 the Governor, and Sir Francis Drake, when the latter, 

 stopping to pay them a courtesy visit in 1586, on his 

 way up from hectoring the Spaniards in the West In- 

 dies, was persuaded to take every discouraged man 

 aboard and back to England. 



And Sir Walter immediately learned to smoke, "pri- 

 vately in his home," they tell us the house at Isling- 

 ton which was long the Pied Bull Inn. Here his arms 

 were emblazoned, topped with a picture of the tobacco 

 plant; the same likeness perhaps that Nicolo Monardes, 

 a Spaniard, made sometime between 1565 and 1571, 

 and published in his Treatise, issued between those 

 years in Seville. This is of unique interest, being the 

 first picture known of any American plant. It is not 

 botanically accurate, but it is nevertheless unmistakably 

 our Nicotiana. 



Sir Walter's tobacco box was cylindrical in form, 

 seven inches in diameter and thirteen long, of gilt 

 leather with a glass or metal container within, capable 

 of holding a pound of the seductive weed. Where it 



