8o ST NICOTINE 



Tidings of the pleasing delusion of tobacco's wonderful 

 curative properties reached these shores towards the close 

 of the sixteenth century, when the pipe was already 

 installed in almost every chimney-nook. Needless to say 

 that lovers of the weed received the intelligence with 

 warmth, and held to the new belief with a steadfastness 

 nothing could shake. Some of England's foremost poets 

 and dramatists signalized their high appreciation of the 

 exotic's rare attributes in imperishable literature. Edmund 

 Spenser, for example, was a great smoker, and as we have 

 already seen, when he and Raleigh met in Ireland they 

 would sit together by the hour over a soothing pipe, while 

 holding delightful contests of reponsive versifying. In the 

 Faerie Queens is a sweet passage telling how Belphcebe 

 hastened into the woods to gather herbs to heal the 

 wounded Timais : 



For the of herbs had great intendiment, 



Taught of the Nymph which from her infancy 



Her nursed had in true nobility : 



There, whether it divine Tobacco were, 



Or Panachea, or Polygony, 



She found and brought it to her patient dear, 



Who all this while lay bleeding out his heart-blood near. 



In a similar vein William Lyly, Queen Elizabeth's court- 

 poet, speaks of the weed in his play entitled The Woman 

 in the Moone. Pandora, having wounded a lover with a 

 spear, urges her attendant to gather 



. . . Balm and cooling violets, 



And of our holy herb nicotian, 



And bring withal pure honey from the hive, 



To heal the wound of my unhappy hand. 



Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and a host of other play- 



