PERSECUTION. / 9 



and Christ's successor ! Present and eternal death, 

 tortures here, and endless torments hereafter, for a 

 whiff or quid of tobacco ! Our sympathies are natu- 

 rally excited for the sufferers. One wonders how they 

 managed to preserve their integrity, or pass through 

 the fires unscathed, or even escape annihilation. Yet 

 most of them did escape, and they did more — they 

 converted the Nebuchadnezzars who sought to con- 

 sume them. Conscious of their innocence and of their 

 rights, they mildly persisted in maintaining them. Of 

 retiring habits, the}?* avoided agitation and debate, 

 declaring that the properties of the proscribed herb 

 made such efforts uncongenial, while it strengthened 

 them in passive resistance, composed their spirits, and 

 rendered them, in a great measure, indifferent to 

 abuse, and often insensible to pain. Hence they 

 smoked, and chewed, and sneezed at home until their 

 hottest enemies became their warmest friends, and 

 greater sinners than themselves had ever been." 



This is no overcharged picture of the great tobacco 

 persecution, of the early part of the seventeenth 

 century. Sandys notes in his travels, having seen an 

 unfortunate Turk conducted about the streets of 

 Constantinople in 1610, mounted backward on an ass 

 with a tobacco-pipe driven through the cartilage of his 

 nose, for the crime of smoking. Now we cannot 

 dissever a Turk from his tobacco, in our idea of him, 

 so little ultimate real effect had this insane crusade. 

 Our King James I. had fortunately not the power to 

 torture his subjects' bodies like Amurath ; or d — n 



