mistress
cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant than by
giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco.' The
royal reformer (not the most virtuous or cleanly of men)
closes his denunciation with this tremendous broadside of
invective:

'Have you not reason, then' he says, 'to be shamed and to
forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so
foolishly received, and so grossly mistaken in the right use
thereof? To your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming
yourself both in persons and goods, and taking also thereby
the notes and marks of vanity upon you by the custom
thereof, making yourselves to be wondered at by all, foreign
civil nations and by all strangers that come among you, and
be scorned, and contemned; a custom both fulsome to the eye,
hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the
lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest
resembling the horrible Stigian smelle of the pit that is
bottomless."

[Illustration: Exhaling through the nose.]

The supposed curative virtues of the tobacco plant had much to do with
its use in Europe while the singular mode of exhaling through the
nostrils added to its charms, and doubtless led to far greater
indulgence. Spenser in his Fairy Queen makes one of the characters
include it with other herbs celebrated for medicinal qualities.

"Into the woods thence-forth in haste she went,
To seek for herbes that mote him remedy;
For she of herbes had great intendiment,
Taught of the Nymph which from her infancy,
Had nursed her in true nobility:
There whether it divine Tobacco were,
Or Panachae, or Polygony,
She found and brought it to her patient deare,
Who all this while lay bleeding out his heart-blood neare."

Lilly also a little later, in his play of The Woman in the Moone
(1597), speaks of it (through one of the characters) as being a
medicinal herb--

"Gather me balme and cooling violets
And of our holy herbe nicotian,
And bring withall pure honey from the hive
To heale the wound of my unhappy hand."

Barclay, in his tract on "The Vertues of Tobacco," recommends its use
as a medicine. The following is one of the modes of use:

"Take of leafe Tobacco as much as, being folded together,
may make a round ball of such bignesse that it may fill the
patient's mouth, and inclyne his face downwards t