2-A2 NARCOTIC USAGES AND SUPERSTITIONS 



" Mechanic slaves 

 "With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall 

 Uplift us to the view; in their thick breaths, 

 Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded, 

 .And forced to drink their vapour.'' 



The references to drinking usages, moreover, are scattered plenti- 

 fully through all his dramas, and intensified by the most homely and 

 familiar illustrations, but without a single reference indicative of 

 smoking usages ; though various passages occur strikingly suggestive 

 of such allusions, had the practice been as familiar as it became 

 in those of younger contemporaries who survived him. In " Much 

 Ado About Nothing," Borachio tells Don John : " being entertain- 

 ed for a periumer, as 1 was smoking a musty room, comes in the 

 Prince and Claudio hand in hand, in sad conference." (Act I. 

 Scene III.) Again in " Komeo and Juliet," Komeo thus speaks of 

 brawling luve : — 



" anything, of nothing first created ! 



heavy lightness! Serious vanity:! 



Mis-shapen chaos of well seeming firms ! 



Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!" 



And again in the same scene he exclaims : — 



' Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs." 

 If, as Maloue infers from a satire of Sir John Davis, and other 

 early notices, tobacco was smoked by the wits and gallants on the 

 English stage, before the close of the sixteenth century, it is difficult 

 to evade the conclusion that such similes may have derived their force 

 from the tobacco fumes which rose visibly in sight of the audience. 

 These allusions and similes, however, have perhaps more resemblance 

 in verbal form, than in embodied fancy, to the ideas now suggested ; 

 and may be deemed, after all, sufficiently independent of the smoker's 

 " cloud" to involve no necessary association with it, even had such 

 been familiar to the poet ; but it seems to me scarcely possible that 

 Shakespeare could have retained unmodified the language of Lady 

 Macbeth, in r.he conclusion of the first act of " Macbeth,'* — one of the 

 productions of his later years, — had the fumes of tobacco been so 

 associated with wine and wassail, as they were within a very few 

 years after the date of that wonderful drama. Encouraging her 

 husband to " screw his courage to the sticking place," she says : — 



'• His two chamberlains 



Will I with wine and wassail so couvmce, 



That memory, the warder of the b aiu, 



Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason 



A limbeck oul v." 



