104 TOBACCO IN EUROPE. 



that finds good in it which others brag of, but do not ; 

 for it is meat, drink, and clothes to him. No man 

 opens his ware with greater seriousness, or challenges 

 your judgment more in the approbation. His shop is 

 the rendezvous of spitting, where men dialogue with 

 their noses, and their communication is smoak.* It 

 is the only place where Spain is commended and 

 preferred before England itself. He should be well 

 experienced in the world, for he has daily trial of men's 

 nostrils, and none is better acquainted with humours. 

 He is the piecing commonly of some other trade, 

 which is bawd to his tobacco, and that to his wife, 

 which is the flame that follows this smoak." In 

 another part of his work our author says of a Tavern, 

 " it is the torrid zone, that scorches the face, and 

 tobacco the gun-powder that blows it up." 



Scattered in the diaries of this era we occasionally 

 meet with a few notices of the prices of tobacco. 

 Thus in the MS. notes made by Sir Henry Oglancler 

 of Nunwell in the Isle of "Wight, in the year 1626 

 he records among other expenses, "for eight ounces 

 of tobacco, five shillings : " he frequently puts down 

 other sums for the same luxury, and in one of his 

 letters to his son in London mentions his disappoint- 

 ment at not getting tobacco with other things ordered 

 to come from the Capital. In the Journal of the 

 Eeverend Giles Moore, published by the Sussex Ar- 

 chasological Society (Vol. I. Transactions), he notes the 



* Minshew calls a tobacconist fumi-vendulus, a smoalc-seller . 



