174 ST NICOTINE 



The play accorded so well with the King's humour that he 

 commanded a repetition of the performance. At that time 

 tobacco-smoking was commonly indulged in at theatres. 

 In Bartholomew Fair a pleasure seeker, named Coke, 

 enters a puppet show and asks of the master, ' Ha' you 

 none of your pretty impudent boys, now, to bring stools, 

 fill tobacco, fetch ale, and beg money, as they have at 

 other houses ? ' 



We pass on to the pages of Thomas Dekker — Dekker 

 the gay, the light-hearted, and always good-humoured, who 

 says of himself that, ' the imagination runs to and fro, the 

 fantasie flies round about, the vital spirits walk up and 

 down, yea, the very pulses shew activities, and with their 

 hammers are still beating, so that in my very dreams it is 

 whispered in my ears that I must be up and doing 

 something.' Among his many delightful sketches ot 

 social life in London, the Gulls Hornbook may well rank 

 first. He makes sport of the young gallants of the city who 

 affect the fashionable habit of ' taking tobacco,' and 

 instructs them how to handle, in the most approved style, 

 the implements with which they are to be provided. In 

 the same bantering tone he apostrophises tobacco thus : 

 ' Make me thine adopted heir, that, inheriting the virtues 

 of thy whiffs, I may distribute them among all nations, and 

 make the fantastic Englishman above all the rest more 

 cunning in the distinction of thy roll-Trinidado, leaf and 

 pudding, than the whitest toothed blackamore in all 

 Asia.' 



In one of those unaccountable freaks of temper which at 

 times seem to take possession of genius Jonson, in the 

 The Poetaster made an unprovoked attack upon Dekker, 

 who, in no way daunted, flew to arms, and in his 

 Satiromastix or the Untrnssing oj the Humcrous Poet, 



