CHAPTER XIII 



THE LITERATURE OF TOBACCO 



Quantity and quality of tobacco books — Early books jiro and 

 con — Real meaning of term 'divine tobacco' — 'Dyet's Dry 

 Dinner' — James's ' Counterblaste' — His 'Apothegms' — 

 Satanic origin of the weed — Medical treatises on tobacco — 

 Burton — The Ovid of tobacco — Classical fables — Sylvester's 

 ' Tobacco Battered and Pipes Shattered ' — Braithwait's 

 ' Smoking Age '—Ben Jonson — Poetry of tobacco — Byron — 

 Kipling — ^J. M. Barrie — Histories of tobacco — Fairholt's — 

 Mahommedan legend — Persian — Mr. Andrew Lang's fairy 

 tale. 



With probably the single exception of religion, there 

 is no subject on which so much printer's ink and paper 

 has been expended as on tobacco and the practice of 

 smoking. From its very introduction into Europe a 

 fierce literary controversy has raged about the use of 

 the Indian herb — a controversy the embers of which 

 are smouldering still in intermittent tracts and 

 periodical pamphlets. Hundreds of volumes have 

 been written attacking, as many defending, and 

 scores in unrestrained eulogy of the 'soverane weed,' 

 as Spenser early christened it. 



The literature of tobacco is exceeded in quantity 

 only by its inferiority of quality. The hundreds of 



