lth, and witts in taking of this loathsome and unsavorie
fume." He admits the popularity of the herb, but expresses his own
personal objection to the "detestable savour or smack that it leaveth
behind upon the taking of it"; from which one is inclined to surmise
that the doctor's first pipe was not an entire success. With an
evident desire to be fair, Venner, notwithstanding his dislike of the
"savour," refuses to condemn tobacco utterly, because of what he
considers its valuable medicinal qualities, and he goes so far as to
give "10 precepts in the use of" tobacco. The sixth is "that you drink
not between the taking of the fumes, as our idle and smoakie
Tobacconists are wont"--there must be no alliance, in short, between
the pipe and the cheerful glass. The tenth and last precept is "that
you goe not abroad into the aire presently [immediately] upon the
taking of the fume, but rather refrain therefrom the space of halfe an
houre, or more, especially if the season be cold, or moist." The
suggestion that the smoker, when he has finished his pipe, shall wait
for half an hour or so before he ventures into the outer air is very
quaint.

Venner goes on to give a terrible catalogue of the ills that will
befall the smoker who uses tobacco "contrary to the order and way I
have set down." It is a dreadful list which may possibly have
frightened a few nervous smokers; but probably it had no greater
effect than the terrible curse in the "Jackdaw of Rheims."

Another tract which may be classed with Venner's "Treatise" was the
"Nepenthes or the Vertues of Tobacco," by Dr. William Barclay, which
was published at Edinburgh in 1614. This is sometimes referred to and
quoted, as by Fairholt, as if it were a whole-hearted defence of
tobacco-taking. But Barclay enlarges mainly on the medicinal virtues
of the herb. "If Tabacco," he says, "were used physically and with
discretion there were no medicament in the worlde comparable to it";
and again: "In Tabacco there is nothing which is not medicine, the
root, the stalke, the leaves, the seeds, the smoake, the ashes." The
doctor gives sundry directions for administering tobacco--"to be used
in infusion, in decoction, in substance, in smoke, in salt." But
Barclay clearly does not sympathize with its indiscriminate use for
pleasure. "As concerning the smoke," he says, "it may be taken more
frequently, and for the said effects, but always fasting, and with
emptie stomack, not as the English abu