sers do, which make a smoke-boxe
of their skull, more fit to be carried under his arme that selleth at
Paris _dunoir a noircir_ to blacke mens shooes then to carie the
braine of him that can not walke, can not ryde except the Tabacco Pype
be in his mouth." He goes on to say that he was once in company with
an English merchant in Normandy--"betweene Rowen and New-haven"--who
was a merry fellow, but was constantly wanting a coal to kindle his
tobacco. "The Frenchman wondered and I laughed at his intemperancie."

It is a little curious, considering the devotion of latter-day men of
letters to tobacco, that in their early days so many of the men who
wrote on the subject attacked the social use of tobacco with violence
and virulence. Perhaps, courtier-like, they followed the lead of the
British Solomon, King James I. Their titles are characteristic of
their style. A writer named Deacon published in 1616 a quarto entitled
"Tobacco tortured in the filthy Fumes of Tobacco refined"; but Joshua
Sylvester had easily surpassed this when he wrote his "Tobacco
Battered and the Pipes Shattered about their Eares, that idely Idolize
so base and barbarous a Weed, or at least overlove so loathsome a
Vanity, by a Volley of Holy Shot Thundered from Mount Helicon," 1615.
Controversialists of that period rejoiced in full-worded titles and in
full-blooded praise or abuse.

Deacon, as the title of his book just quoted shows, was very fond of
alliteration, and one sentence of his diatribe may be quoted. He
warned his readers that tobacco-smoke was "very pernicious unto their
bodies, too profluvious for many of their purses, and most pestiferous
to the publike State." Much may be forgiven, however, to the
introducer of so charming a term of abuse as "profluvious." Deacon's
book takes the form of a dialogue, and after nearly 200 pages of
argument, in which the unfortunate herb gets no mercy, one of the
interlocutors, a trader in tobacco, is so convinced of the iniquity of
his trade, and of his own parlous state if he continue therein, that
he declares that the two hundred pounds' worth of this "beastly
tobacco" which he owns, shall "presently packe to the fire," or else
be sent "swimming down the Thames."

Many good folk would seem to have associated smoking with idling. In
the rules of the Grammar School at Chigwell, Essex, which was founded
in 1629, it is prescribed that "the Master must be a man of sound
religion, neither a Papist nor a Puri