CHAPTER VIII

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STRAY LEAVES FROM THE INDIAN WEED

The late Poet Laureate’s (Tennyson) love of tobacco-smoking—Science detects poisonous elements in the exotic—The philosophy of smoking—The only thing in life that fumes without fretting and assuages the fretful—The bachelor’s love of seclusion with his pipe—Napoleon’s first and last attempt at smoking—A distraught youth and an Oriental sage, an eastern view of the virtue of the weed—Raleigh and the New World—His expedition to explore the coast of the El Dorado and win renown for England and his idolized Queen Bess—England’s first smokers—Hawkins, not Raleigh, the first to bring tobacco to this country—Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth—The wager as to the weight of the smoke exhaled from a pipeful of tobacco—King James’s ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco’—Its home cultivation and manufacture—Ben Jonson’s ‘Alchemist’—‘Bartholomew Faire’—Dr. Barclay on sophistication of tobacco—Old Rome smoked coltsfoot and leaves of the lettuce—Paper warfare over the virtues or vices of the Indian weed—Joshua Sylvester sends a ‘volley of holy shot’ against the ‘idolatrous weed’—Samuel Rowland’s ‘Knave of Clubbs,’ a humorous satire on tobacco-smoking—Eastern potentates’ treatment of smokers of the Frankish novelty—Russian atrocities inflicted on users of the weed—Foreign Governments begin to see in it an easy means of augmenting revenue—Peter the Great invites English tobacco merchants to Moscow in order to establish a factory there for the manufacture of tobacco—Queen Anne in Council disapproves of the scheme, and orders our Envoy to destroy the works and return the workmen to their homes.

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