21 8 The Soverane Herbe 



volumes in all languages which tobacco has called 

 forth form, with scarcely an exception, wearisome and 

 tedious reading, whether the subject is approached 

 from a medical, moral, poetic, social^ or rational (save 

 the mark !) standpoint. If it be true, as one writer 

 declared, that ' a whole ounce of tobacco will hardly 

 purchase one dram of wit,' the works of anti-smokers 

 prove that abstinence from tobacco in no wise im- 

 proves the mental faculties. Beside the task of 

 reading and reviewing the books, pamphlets, poems 

 and treatises written for and against tobacco during 

 the last three centuries, Carlyle's 'job of buckwash- 

 ing ' for his ' Life of Cromwell ' sinks into insignifi- 

 cance. It is improbable that any man ever will, and 

 indesirable that he should, devote himself to the truly 

 Herculean task of sifting and sorting the huge mass 

 of nicotian printages to present an intelligible precis 

 thereof, and to rescue from deserved oblivion the few 

 gems of wit or wisdom that problematically are buried 

 therein. 



The best and fairest method of review would be to 

 estimate them, as Macaulay did a ponderous tome, by 

 the aid of avoirdupois, linear, square and cubic 

 measures. But the task, in which a modern statis- 

 tician would revel, of numbering the volumes in folios, 

 quartos and octavos, in piling them to the height of 

 St. Paul's, in girding the earth with them, in covering 

 Africa with the area of their pages, in dwindling Mont 

 Blanc beside their cubic mass, and arraying in serried 

 lines the railway trains necessary to convey the tons 

 of tobacco books, we will not attempt. This chapter 

 does not pretend to be a review of the literature of 



