176 TOBACCO BOXES. 
introduction of coffee into England in the midst of the 
Puritan epoch, when Englishmen wanted some kind of drink. 
which would “at once make them sober and merry,” the 
writer glorifies the coffee-house. 
John Taylor, “the Water Poet,” made a kind of compro- 
mise when he attributed the introduction of tobacco, not to 
the devil, but to Pluto,—“Pluto’s Proclamation concerning 
his Infernal Pleasure for the Propagation of Tobacco.” It 
appears in the folio collection of his works of the year 1628. 
The confusion of tobacco with opium and such destructive 
drugs seems to have been common with the travelers of the 
Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. Camerarius, in his 
“Historical Meditations,” translated into English by John 
Malle (folio, 1621), speaks of tobacco as to be seen growing in 
many gardens throughout Europe. He ‘quotes Jerome 
Benzo as saying that in Hispaniola “there be among them 
some that take so much of it, as their senses ‘being all over- 
come and made drunke with the same, they fell down flat to 
the ground as if they were dead, and there lie without sense 
or feeling most part of the day or of the night.” 
The tobacco-box, during the reign of Elizabeth, was no 
unimportant part of a dandy’s outfit ; sometimes a pouch or 
bag was used. Tobacco-boxes came into general use in 
England soon after the introduction of tobacco, and were 
much sought after by all who “drank” tobacco. Marston, 
the Duke of New Castle, and other dramatists, alluded to the 
tobacco-box as a part of the smoker’s outfit; thus in the play 
of “The Man in the Moone” (1609), one character, in 
answer to an inquiry who one of the company is, answers: 
“T know not certainly, but I think he cometh to play you a 
fit of mirth, for I behelde pipes in his pocket; now he 
draweth forth his tinder-box and his touchwood, and falleth 
to his tacklings; sure his throate is on fire, the smoke flyeth 
80 fast from his mouth; blesse his beard with a bason of 
water, lest he burn it; some terrible thing he taketh, it 
maketh him pant and look pale, and hath an odious taste, he 
spitteth so after it. 
