92 HUMOROUS QUOTATIONS. 



" ' Boladil. Body o' me, here's the remainder of seven 

 pound since yesterday was seven-night! 'Tis your right 

 Trinadado ! Did you never take any, Master Stephen ? 



" ' Stephen. No, truly, Sir ; but I'll learn to take it since 

 you commend it so. 



" ' Bobadil. Sir, believe me upon my relation, for what 

 I tell you the world shall not reprove. I have been in the 

 Indies where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor 

 a dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge, have received 

 the taste of any other nutriment in the world, for the space 

 of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only. 

 Therefore, it cannot be but 'tis most divine. Further, take 

 it, in the true kind, so, it makes an antidote, that had you 

 taken the most deadly poisonous plant in all Italy, it should 

 expel it and clarify you with as much ease as I speak. And 

 for your greenwound, your balsamum, and your St. John's- 

 wort, are all mere gulleries and trash to it, especially your 

 Trinidado : your Nicotian is good too. I could say what I 

 know of it for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours, 

 crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this kind, but I 

 profess myself no quack-salver : only thus much, by Hercules ; 

 I do hold it, and will affirm it before any prince in Europe, 

 to be the most sovereign and precious weed that ever the 

 earth tendered to the use of man.' 



Cob. " ' By gad's me, I mar'l what pleasure or felicity they 

 have in taking this roguish tobacco ! It's good for nothing 

 but to choke a man and till him full of smoke and embers. 

 There were four died out of one house last week with taking 

 of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight ; one of 

 them, they say, will ne'er 'scape it : he voided a bushel of 

 soot yesterday, upward and downward. By the stocks ! an* 

 there were no wiser men than I, I'd have it present whipping, 

 man or woman that should but deal with a tobacco-pipe ; 

 why, it will stifle them all in the end, as many as use it ; it's 

 little better than rats-bane or rosaker.' " * 



From the first announcement that English navigators had 

 discovered tobacco in Virginia, until the London and Ply- 

 mouth companies sailed for the New World, the deepest 

 interest was taken in the voyagers. Drayton, the poet, wrote 

 of "The Virginian Voyage," while Chapman and other 

 dramatists wrote plays in which allusions were made to Vir- 

 ginia. In the " Mask of Flowers," performed at "White Hall 



A preparation of arsenic. 



