Ale, and Tobacco 11 



show a tendency to personify the rival liquors. It is not surprising, 

 therefore, that the question of the relative merits of the beverages 

 should, under the influence of other debates, have flowered into a 

 dramatized dispute.^ 



The tobacco episode, added in the second edition, has behind it a 

 fiercer and more novel controversy. Ever since the introduction of 

 the herb into Europe its merits and demerits had been hotly canvassed 

 by a hundred pens. Learned physicians wrote disquisitions on its 

 medicinal value. Monarchs lost their dignity whUe inveighing 

 against its vileness. The history of this quarrel is too extensive and 

 too familiar to be recorded here.^ There are, however, a number of 

 individual tobacco documents which deserve special consideration 

 because of their approximation in one way or another to the present 

 debate. 



Tobacco not infrequently appears in seventeenth century litera- 

 ture in propria persona. Thus in Lingtia, Tobacco makes an elaborate 

 speech in praise of his own virtues. The herb is constantly associated 

 with alcoholic liquors in the literature of the time, as it was, of course, 

 in life, and this association was emphasized by the common use of the 

 term "drink" as applied to the taking of tobacco. Ale and tobacco 

 are praised together in Ravenscroft's Brief Discourse of Music (1614). 

 Barnabe Riche, in his Honestie of this Age, notes that drinking and 

 smoking almost invariably go together, "for it is a commodity that is 

 now as vendible in every taverne, inne and ale-house, as eyther wine, 

 ale, or beare. " 



It is natural enough, then, that tobacco, the "dry drink," should 

 appear in literature as a rival of the standard beverages. A ballad in 

 Wit's Recreation (1640), entitled "The Tryumph of Tobacco over Sack 



^ "A Dialogue between Claret and Darby Ale; A Poem considered in an accidental conversation 

 between two gentlemen" was printed for E. Richardson in 1691. See Marchant, In Praise of Ate, 

 London, 1888, p. 434, for a reprint. 



^ See Arber, English Reprints, Works of James I, 81 ff: On the IrUroduclion ani Early Use of Tobacco 

 In England. 



