amned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul!"--BURTON. _Anatomy
of Melancholy_.

A delicate subject? Very true; and one which must be handled as tenderly
as _biscuit de Sevres_, or Venetian glass. Whichever side of the
question we may assume, as the most popular, or the most right, the
feelings of so large and respectable a minority are to be consulted,
that it behooves the critic or reviewer to move cautiously, and,
imitating the actions of a certain feline household reformer, to show
only the _patte de velours_.

The omniscient Burton seems to have reached the pith of the matter. The
two hostile sections of his proposition, though written so long since,
would very well fit the smoker and the reformer of to-day. That portion
of the world which is enough advanced to advocate reforms is entirely
divided against itself on the subject of Tobacco. Immense interests,
economical, social, and, as some conceive, moral, are arrayed on either
side. The reformers have hitherto had the better of it in point of
argument, and have pushed the attack with most vigor, yet with but
trifling results. Smokers and chewers, _et id omne genus_, mollified
by their habits, or laboring under guilty consciences, have made but a
feeble defence. Nor in all this is there anything new. It is as old as
the knowledge of the "weed" among thinking men,--in other words, about
three centuries. The English adventurers under Drake and Raleigh and
Hawkins, and the multitude of minor Protestant "filibusters" who
followed in their train, had no sooner imported the habit of smoking
tobacco, among the other outlandish customs which they brought home from
the new Indies and the Spanish Main, than the higher powers rebuked
the practice, which novelty and its own fascinations were rendering so
fashionable, in language more forcible than elegant. The philippic of
King James is so apposite that we may be pardoned for transcribing one
oft-quoted sentence:--"But herein is not only a great vanity, but a
great contempt of God's good gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath,
being a good gift of God, should be wilfully corrupted by this stinking
smoke.... A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmfull
to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume
thereof neerest resembling the horrible Stygian smoake of the pit that
is bottomless."[a]

[Footnote a: _Counterblast to Tobacco_.]

The Popes Urban VIII. and Innocent XII. fulm