t divine. Further, take
it, in the true kind, so, it makes an antidote, that had you
taken the most deadly poisonous plant in all Italy, it
should expel it and clarify you with as much ease as I
speak. And for your greenwound, your balsamum, and your St.
John's-wort, are all mere gulleries and trash to it,
especially your Trinidado: your Nicotian is good too. I
could say what I know of it for the expulsion of rheums, raw
humours, crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this
kind, but I profess myself no quack-salver: only thus much,
by Hercules; I do hold it, and will affirm it before any
prince in Europe, to be the most sovereign and precious weed
that ever the earth tendered to the use of man.'

_Cob._ "'By gad's me, I mar'l what pleasure or felicity they
have in taking this roguish tobacco! It's good for nothing
but to choke a man and fill him full of smoke and embers.
There were four died out of one house last week with taking
of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight; one of
them, they say, will ne'er 'scape it: he voided a bushel of
soot yesterday, upward and downward. By the stocks! an'
there were no wiser men than I, I'd have it present
whipping, man or woman that should but deal with a
tobacco-pipe; why, it will stifle them all in the end, as
many as use it; it's little better than rats-bane or
rosaker.'"[40]

[Footnote 40: A preparation of arsenic.]

From the first announcement that English navigators had discovered
tobacco in Virginia, until the London and Plymouth companies sailed
for the New World, the deepest interest was taken in the voyagers.
Drayton, the poet, wrote of "The Virginian Voyage," while Chapman and
other dramatists wrote plays in which allusions were made to Virginia.
In the "Mask of Flowers," performed at White Hall upon Twelfth Night,
1613-14, one of the characters challenges another, and asserts that
wine is more worthy than tobacco. The costumes were exceedingly
grotesque and suggestive of the New rather than of the Old World.
Kawosha one of the principal characters rode in, wearing on his head a
cap of red-cloth of gold, from his ears were pendants, a glass chain
was about his neck, his body and legs were covered with olive-colored
stuff, in his hands were a bow and arrows, and the bases of
tobacco--colored stuff cut like tobacco leaves.