"Emblems," treating it in this serio-comic vein:--

"Flint-hearted Stoics, you whose marble eyes
Contemn a wrinkle, and whose souls despise
To follow Nature's too affected fashion,
Or travel in the regent walk of passion,--
Whose rigid hearts disdain to shrink at
fears,
Or play at fast-and-loose with smiles and
tears,--
Come, burst your spleens with laughter to
behold
A new-found vanity, which days of old
Ne'er knew,--a vanity that has beset
The world, and made more slaves than Mahomet,--
That has condemned us to the servile yoke
Of slavery, and made us slaves to smoke,
But stay! why tax I thus our modern
times
For new-born follies and for new-born
crimes?
Are we sole guilty, and the first age free?
No: they were smoked and slaved as well
as we.
What's sweet-lipped honor's blast, but
smoke? what's treasure,
But very smoke? and what's more smoke
than pleasure?"

Brand gives us the whole matter in a nutshell, in the following quaint
epigram, entitled "A Tobacconist," taken from an old collection:--

"All dainty meats I do defy
Which feed men fat as swine;
He is a frugal man, indeed,
That on a leaf can dine.

"He needs no napkin for his hands
His fingers' ends to wipe,
That keeps his kitchen in a box,
And roast meat in a pipe."

And so on, the singers of succeeding years, _usque ad nauseam_,--a
loathing equalled only by that of the earlier writers for the plant, now
so lauded.

Tobacco-worship seems to us to culminate in the following stanza from a
German song:--

"Tabak ist mein Leben,
Dem hab' ich mich ergeben, ergeben;
Tabak ist meine Lust.
Und eh' ich ihn sollt' lassen,
Viel lieber wollt' ich hassen,
Ja, hassen selbst eines Maedchens Kuss."

As it is with your sex, my dear Madam, that this question of Tobacco is
to be mainly argued,--for, to your honor be it spoken, you have always
been of the reformatory party,--let us hope, that, provided you have
not read or translated the last verse, you have recovered your natural
amiability, ruffled perhaps by this odious subject, and are prepared
to believe us when we tell you that these opposite opinions cannot be
wholly reconciled, and to follow us patiently while we attempt to show
that a certain gentleman, introduced to your maternal ancestor at a very
remote period of the world's history, is not so black as he is sometimes
painted. Let us keep good-natured, at least,