96 BEN JONSON ON THE "WEED." 



of Shakespeare's time sat on low stools smoking; they sat 

 with their three sorts of tobacco beside them, and handed 

 each other lights on the points of their swords, sending out 

 their pages for more Trinidado if they required it. Many 

 gallants 4 took ' their tobacco in the lords room over the stage, 

 and went out to (Saint) Paul's to spit there privately. 

 Shabby sponges and lying adventurers, like Bobadil, bragged 

 of the number of packets of ' the most divine tobacco ' they 

 had smoked in a week, and told enormous lies of living 

 for weeks in the Indies on the fumes alone. They affirmed 

 it was an antidote to all poison ; that it expelled rheums, sour 

 humours, and obstructions of all kinds. Some doctors were 

 of opinion that it would heal gout * and the ague, neutralise 

 the effects of drunkenness, and remove weariness and hunger. 

 The poor on the other hand, not disinclined to be envious 

 and detracting when judging rich men's actions, laughed at 

 men who made chimneys of their throats, or who sealed up 

 their noses with snuff. 



" Ben Jonson makes that dry, shrewd, water carrier of his, 

 Cob, rail at the ' roguish tobacco :' he would leave the stocks 

 for worse men, and make it present whipping for either man 

 or woman who dealt with a tobacco-pipe. But King James, 

 in his inane * Counterblast, 'is more violent than even Cob. 

 He argues that to use this unsavory smoke is to be guilty of 

 a worse sin than that of drunkenness, and asks how men, who 

 cannot go a day's journey without sending for hot coals to 

 kindle their tobacco, can be expected to endure the privations 

 of war. Smoking, the angry and fuming king protests, had 

 made our manners as rude as those of the fish-wives of 

 Dieppe. Smokers, tossing pipes and puffing smoke over the 

 dinner-table, forgot all cleanliness and modesty. Men now, 

 he says, cannot welcome a friend but straight they must be 

 in hand with tobacco. He that refused a pipe in company 

 was accounted peevish and unsociable. * Yea,' says the royal 

 coxcomb and pedant, < the mistress cannot in a more mannerly 

 kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair 

 hand a pipe of tobacco.' The royal reformer (not the most 

 virtuous or cleanly of men) closes his denunciation with this 

 tremendous broadside of invective : 



'Have you not reason, then' he says, 'to be shamed and 

 to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so foolishly 

 received, and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? 



" Some hold it for a singular remedle against the gowte (gont). to chaw every morning 

 the leaves of Petum (tobacco), because it voideth great quantitie of flegme out at the 

 mouth, hindering the same from falling upon the Joints, which is the very cause of the 

 gowte." Dr. Richard Surflet (1606). 



