ot leave it, it doth bewitch
him."--KING JAMES'S COUNTERBLAST TO TOBACCO.

America is especially responsible to the whole world for tobacco, since
the two are twin-sisters, born to the globe in a day. The sailors first
sent on shore by Columbus came back with news of a new continent and
a new condiment. There was solid land, and there was a novel perfume,
which rolled in clouds from the lips of the natives. The fame of the two
great discoveries instantly began to overspread the world; but the smoke
travelled fastest, as is its nature. There are many races which have not
yet heard of America: there are very few which have not yet tasted of
tobacco. A plant which was originally the amusement of a few savage
tribes has become in a few centuries the fancied necessary of life to
the most enlightened nations of the earth, and it is probable that there
is nothing cultivated by man which is now so universally employed.

And the plant owes this width of celebrity to a combination of natural
qualities so remarkable as to yield great diversities of good and evil
fame. It was first heralded as a medical panacea, "the most sovereign
and precious weed that ever the earth tendered to the use of man," and
was seldom mentioned, in the sixteenth century, without some reverential
epithet. It was a plant divine, a canonized vegetable. Each nation
had its own pious name to bestow upon it. The French called it
_herbe sainte, herbe sacree, herbe propre a tous maux, panacee
antarctique_,--the Italians, _herba santa croce_,--the Germans, _heilig
wundkraut_. Botanists soberly classified it as _herba panacea_ and
_herba sancta_, and Gerard in his "Herbal" fixed its name finally
as _sana sancta Indorum_, by which title it commonly appears in the
professional recipes of the time. Spenser, in his "Faerie Queene,"
bids the lovely Belphoebe gather it as "divine tobacco," and Lilly the
Euphuist calls it "our holy herb Nicotian," ranking it between violets
and honey. It was cultivated in France for medicinal purposes solely,
for half a century before any one there used it for pleasure, and till
within the last hundred years it was familiarly prescribed, all over
Europe, for asthma, gout, catarrh, consumption, headache; and, in short,
was credited with curing more diseases than even the eighty-seven which
Dr. Shew now charges it with producing.

So vast were the results of all this sanitary enthusiasm, that the use
of tobacco in Europe probably reached