160 ST NICOTINE 



dealing a crushing blow to the young colony, his action 

 had other far-reaching effects. It created a daring race of 

 smugglers, who did a thriving contraband trade in tobacco 

 with pirates on the Spanish main ; and home dealers saw 

 in the greatly enhanced price of the weed a temptation to 

 ' sophisticate ' too powerful to be resisted. Scattered 

 through the literature of that period may be found some 

 curious allusions to the practice, as in Ben Jonson's 

 Alchemist, where Abel Drugger, speaking in praise of his 

 tobacconist, says : 



He lets me have good tobacco, and he does not 

 Sophisticate it with sack-lees or oil ; 



Nor washes it in muscadel and grains, 



******* 



But keeps it in fine lilly pots, that, opened, 

 Smell like a conserve of roses, or French beans. 

 He has his maple block, his silver tongs, 

 Winchester pipes, and fire of juniper. 



In Bartholomew Faire he presents us with a picture of 

 one, Ursula, a vendor of roast pig, bidding her servant 

 ' Look to't, sirrah, you had best ! three pence a pipe full I 

 will ha' made of all my whole half pound of tobacco, and a 

 quarter of a pound of coltsfoot, mixed with it too, to eke it 

 out.' That sophisticating practices were growing apace 

 may be gleaned from Dr. Barclay, of Edinburgh, who in 

 his Nepenthes (1614) speaks of 'tobacco merchants 

 apparelling European plants with Indian coats and 

 enstalling them in shops as righteous and legitimate 

 tobacco." (How very conservative we English are !) 

 1 Some others, indeed, have tobacco from Florida that they 

 sophisticate and farde in sundrie sorts with black spice, 

 galanga, aqua-vitae, Spanish wine, anise seedes, oyle of 

 spicke, and such like.' Less expensive materials than 



