30 The Soverane Herbe 



Though tobacco was seized upon by the doctors as 

 their special property, it was not permitted by the 

 people to become a medical monopoly. Though 

 generally regarded as a remedy, Elizabethan England 

 smoked it without being under medical advice. It 

 was accounted wholesome and beneficial under all 

 circumstances, and taken accordingly. Harlot testi- 

 fies that men and women of all classes ' took tobacco ' 

 for their health, particularly as a specific against the 

 effects of the damp, uncertain climate, which was 

 then, as now, the Englishman's scapegoat for all his 

 physical, social, and moral shortcomings. It maybe 

 surmised also that the pleasure derived from the 

 divine herb, as Spenser had already styled it, was no 

 inconsiderable factor of its popularity. 



Smoking spread widely and quickly, for, as a poet 

 said, it had 



'Come to help this cold phlegmatic soyle.' 



' In these dales,' said a writer of 1590, 'the taking 

 of the smoke of the Indian herb called tobacco by 

 an instrument formed like a little ladell, whereby it 

 passeth from the mouth into the hed and stomake, is 

 gretlie taken up and used in England against Rewmes, 

 and some other diseases ingendered in the lunges and 

 other parts ; and not without effect,' he quaintly 

 adds. 



Not unfitly was smoking compared to ' Elias' cloud 

 which was no bigger than a man's hand that hath 

 suddenly covered the face of the earth.' So rapidly 

 did the practice spread, that before the end of the 

 sixteenth century it was fiercely assailed and opposed. 



