ston in 1604, Sly says in the
introduction: 'Come, coose, (coz or goose!) let's take some
tobacco.'

"In 'The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street,' published
in 1607, and attributed by some to Shakespeare,
tobacco-taking or tobacco-drinking (as smoking was then
usually called) appears no longer in the induction, but in
the play itself, Idle, the highwayman, says to the old
soldier, Skirmish, 'Have you any tobacco about you?' Idle
being supplied, smokes a pipe on the stage. These extracts,
however, may have been cited before, together with others of
like character in the great days of the English Drama. Pipes
continued to appear upon the stage until its abolition (in
company with the Prayer Book) by the Puritan rulers. They
reappeared on the stage of the Restoration. In Thomas
Shadwell's 'Virtuos' (1676),--to take one instance,--Mirando
and Clarinda fling away Snarl's cane, hat and periwig, and
break his pipes, because he 'takes nasty tobacco before
ladies.'"

There is printed evidence, however, in this same period to show not
only that all the English ladies of the time were not enemies to
tobacco, but that some of them were themselves smokers. In 1674 an
anonymous quarto appeared under the title of "The Women's Petition
against Coffee." It was a protest against the growing influence of the
coffee-houses in seducing men away from their homes to sit together
making mischief and drinking "this boiled soot." It was answered in
the same year by "The Men's Answer to the Women's Petition." After
speaking of the providential introduction of coffee into England in
the midst of the Puritan epoch, when Englishmen wanted some kind of
drink which would "at once make them sober and merry," the writer
glorifies the coffee-house.

John Taylor, "the Water Poet," made a kind of compromise when he
attributed the introduction of tobacco, not to the devil, but to
Pluto,--"Pluto's Proclamation concerning his Infernal Pleasure for the
Propagation of Tobacco." It appears in the folio collection of his
works of the year 1628. The confusion of tobacco with opium and such
destructive drugs seems to have been common with the travelers of the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. Camerarius, in his "Historical
Meditations," translated into English by John Malle (folio, 1621),
speaks of tobacco as to be seen growing in many gardens throughout
Europe.