d handed
each other lights on the points of their swords, sending out
their pages for more Trinidado if they required it. Many
gallants 'took' their tobacco in the lords room over the
stage, and went out to (Saint) Paul's to spit there
privately. Shabby sponges and lying adventurers, like
Bobadil, bragged of the number of packets of 'the most
divine tobacco' they had smoked in a week, and told enormous
lies of living for weeks in the Indies on the fumes alone.
They affirmed it was an antidote to all poison; that it
expelled rheums, sour humours, and obstructions of all
kinds. Some doctors were of opinion that it would heal
gout[43] and the ague, neutralise the effects of
drunkenness, and remove weariness and hunger. The poor on
the other hand, not disinclined to be envious and detracting
when judging rich men's actions, laughed at men who made
chimneys of their throats, or who sealed up their noses with
snuff.

[Footnote 43: "Some hold it for a singular remedie
against the gowte (gout), to chaw every morning the
leaves of Petum (tobacco), because it voideth great
quantitie of flegme out at the mouth, hindering the same
from falling upon the joints, which is the very cause of
the gowte." _Dr. Richard Surflet_ (1606).]

"Ben Jonson makes that dry, shrewd, water carrier of his,
Cob, rail at the 'roguish tobacco:' he would leave the
stocks for worse men, and make it present whipping for
either man or woman who dealt with a tobacco-pipe. But King
James, in his inane 'Counterblast,' is more violent than
even Cob. He argues that to use this unsavory smoke is to be
guilty of a worse sin than that of drunkenness, and asks how
men, who cannot go a day's journey without sending for hot
coals to kindle their tobacco, can be expected to endure the
privations of war. Smoking, the angry and fuming king
protests, had made our manners as rude as those of the
fish-wives of Dieppe. Smokers, tossing pipes and puffing
smoke over the dinner-table, forgot all cleanliness and
modesty. Men now, he says, cannot welcome a friend but
straight they must be in hand with tobacco. He that refused
a pipe in company was accounted peevish and unsociable.
'Yea,' says the royal coxcomb and pedant, 'the