CHAPTER IX. 



SOCIAL GOSSIP ABOUT THE WEED. 



Why should we so much despise 

 So good and wholesome an exercise 

 As early and late, to meditate ? 

 Thus think, and drink tobacco. 



G. W. 



ANCIENT and delightful George Wither, while suffering for 

 conscience' sake imprisonment in the Marshalsea, found a 

 never-failing comfort in his beloved Indian weed. Its sooth- 

 ing vapours moved him to meditation ; the earthen pipe, the 

 burning weed, the vanishing fumes, and the ashes left behind, 

 were to him emblems of the transitory nature of man's earthly 

 career. Musing thus, he poured forth his thoughts in a poem 

 which has taken a firmer hold on the popular taste than any 

 other of the countless songs composed on the subject of 

 tobacco. It has undergone numerous alterations, but in 

 every instance for the worse. In a mutilated form, and with 

 a second part added, it is found among the ' Gospel Sonnets' 

 of the Rev. Ralph Erskine, of the Scottish Church. It is 

 the ' Smoking Spiritualized ' which is still in print among the 

 ballad-vendors of the east end of London. It reappeared 

 with variations in Mr. J. H. Dixon's ' Songs and Ballads of 

 the Peasantry of England'; and again in the Rev. James 

 Plumptre's ' Tobacco is an Indian weed.' So popular had 



