which he said some curious things. He objected to the
medicinal use of tobacco, and quite agreed with previous speakers
that such a use must have arisen among Barbarians and Indians, who he
went on to say had as much knowledge of medicine as they had of
civilized customs. If, he argued, there were men whose bodies were
benefited by tobacco-smoke, this did not so much redound to the credit
of tobacco, as it did reflect upon the depraved condition of such men,
that their bodies should have sunk to the level of those of Barbarians
so as to be affected by remedies such as were effective on the bodies
of Barbarians and Indians! His Majesty kindly suggested that doctors
who believed in tobacco as a remedial agent should take themselves and
their medicine of pollution off to join the Indians.

III

TOBACCO TRIUMPHANT (_continued_)--SELLERS OF TOBACCO AND PROFESSORS OF
SMOKING--ABUSE AND PRAISE OF TOBACCO

This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow;
He lets me have good tobacco.

BEN JONSON, _The Alchemist._

The druggists and other tradesmen who sold tobacco in Elizabethan and
Jacobean days had every provision for the convenience of their
numerous customers. Some so-called druggists, it may be shrewdly
suspected, did much more business in tobacco than they did in drugs.
Dekker tells us of an apothecary and his wife who had no customers
resorting to their shop "for any phisicall stuffe," but whose shop had
many frequenters in the shape of gentlemen who "came to take their
pipes of the divine smoake." That tobacco was often the most
profitable part of a druggist's stock is also clear from the last
sentence in Bishop Earle's character of "A Tobacco-Seller," one of the
shortest in that remarkable collection of "Characters" which the
Bishop issued in 1628 under the title of "Micro-Cosmographie."

"A Tobacco-Seller," says Earle, "is the onely man that findes good in
it which others brag of, but do not; for it is meate, drinke, and
clothes to him. No man opens his ware with greater seriousnesse, or
challenges your judgement more in the approbation. His shop is the
Randevous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses, and their
communication is smoake. It is the place onely where Spaine is
commended, and prefer'd before England itselfe. He should be well
experienc'd in the world: for he ha's daily tryall of mens nostrils,
and none is better acquainted with humors. Hee is the piecing commonly
of so