96 ‘BEN JONSON ON THE “WEED.” 
of Shakespeare’s time sat on low stools smoking; they sat 
with their three sorts of tobacco beside them, and handed 
each other lights on the points of their swords, sending out 
their pages for more Trinidado if they required it. any 
gallants ‘took’ their tobacco in the lords room over the stage, 
and went out to (Saint) Paul’s to spit there privately. 
Shabby sponges and lying adventurers, like Bobadil, bragged 
of the number of packets of ‘the most divine tobacco’ they 
had‘ smoked in a week, and told enormous lies of living 
for weeks in the Indies on the fumes alone. They affirmed 
it was an antidote to all poison; that it expelled rheums, sour 
‘humours, and obstructions of all kinds. Some doctors were 
of opinion that it would heal gout* and the ague, neutralise 
the effects of drunkenness, and remove weariness and hunger. 
The poor on the other hand, not disinclined to be envious 
and detracting when judging rich men’s actions, laughed at 
men who made chimneys of their throats, or who sealed up 
their noses with snuff. 
“ Ben Jonson makes that dry, shrewd, water carrier of his, 
Cob, rail at the ‘ roguish tobacco :’ he would leave the stocks 
for worse men, and make it present whipping for either man 
or woman who dealt with a tobacco-pipe. But King James, 
in his inane ‘Counterblast,’ is more violent than even Cob. 
He argues that to use this unsavory smoke is to be guilty of 
a worse sin than that of drunkenness, and asks how men, who 
cannot go a day’s journey without sending for hot coals to 
kindle their tobacco, can be expected to endure the privations 
of war. Smoking, the angry and fuming king protests, had 
-made our manners ag rude as those of the fish-wives of 
Dieppe. Smokers, tossing pipes and puffing smoke over the 
dinner-table, forgot all cleanliness and modesty. Men now, 
he says, cannot welcome a friend but straight they must be 
in hand with tobacco. He that refused a pipe in company 
was accounted peevish and unsociable. ‘Yea,’ says the royal 
coxcomb and pedant, ‘the mistress cannot in a more mannerly 
kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair 
hand a pipe of tobacco.’ The royal reformer (not the most 
virtuous or cleanly of men) closes his denunciation with this 
tremendous broadside of invective : 
‘Have you not reason, then’ he says, ‘to be shamed and 
to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely rounded, so foolishly 
received, and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? 
*“ Some hold it fora singular remedie against the gowt 
the leaves of Petum (tobacco), because it voideth ereat WeoREue OF thd her oe the 
] t. 
mouth, hindering the same from fa u high 
oa ‘ ior Mesnted a soling pon the joints, which is the very cause of the 
