the only exports. During the year 1619
the company in England imported twenty thousand pounds of tobacco, the
entire crop of the preceding year. James I endeavored to draw a
"prerogative" revenue from what he termed a pernicious weed, and against
which he had published his _Counterblast_; but he was restrained from
this illegal measure by a resolution of the House of Commons. In 1607 he
sent a letter forbidding the use of tobacco at St. Mary's College,
Cambridge.

Smoking was the first mode of using tobacco in England, and when Sir
Walter Raleigh first introduced the custom among people of fashion, in
order to escape observation he smoked privately in his house (at
Islington); the remains of which were till of late years to be seen, as
an inn, long known as the Pied Bull. This was the first house in England
in which tobacco was smoked, and Raleigh had his arms emblazoned there,
with a tobacco-plant on the top. There existed also another tradition in
the parish of St. Matthew, Friday Street, London, that Raleigh was
accustomed to sit smoking at his door in company with Sir Hugh
Middleton. Sir Walter's guests were entertained with pipes, a mug of
ale, and a nutmeg, and on these occasions he made use of his
tobacco-box, which was of cylindrical form, seven inches in diameter and
thirteen inches long; the outside of gilt leather, and within a receiver
of glass or metal, which held about a pound of tobacco. A kind of collar
connected the receiver with the case, and on every side the box was
pierced with holes for the pipes. This relic was preserved in the museum
of Ralph Thoresby, of Leeds, in 1719, and about 1843 was added, by the
late Duke of Sussex, to his collection of the smoking-utensils of all
nations.

Although Raleigh first introduced the custom of smoking tobacco in
England, yet its use appears to have been not entirely unknown before,
for one Kemble, condemned for heresy in the time of Queen Mary the
Bloody, while walking to the stake smoked a pipe of tobacco. Hence the
last pipe that one smoked was called the Kemble pipe.

The writer of a pamphlet, supposed to have been Milton's father,
describes many of the playbooks and pamphlets of that day, 1609, as
"conceived over night by idle brains, impregnated with tobacco smoke and
mulled sack, and brought forth by the help of midwifery of a candle next
morning." At the theatres in Shakespeare's time the spectators were
allowed to sit on the stage, and to be attende