A DELICATE subject? Very true; and one which must be handled as tenderly as biscuit de Sèvres, or Venetian glass. Whichever side of the question we may assume, as the most popular, or the most right, the feelings of so large and respectable a minority are to be consulted, that it behooves the critic or reviewer to move cautiously, and, imitating the actions of a certain feline household reformer, to show only the patte de velours.

The omniscient Burton seems to have reached the pith of the matter. The two hostile sections of his proposition, though written so long since, would very well fit the smoker and the reformer of to-day. That portion of the world which is enough advanced to advocate reforms is entirely divided against itself on the subject of Tobacco. Immense interests, economical, social, and, as some conceive, moral, are arrayed on either side. The reformers have hitherto had the better of it in point of argument, and have pushed the attack with most vigor, yet with but trifling results. Smokers and chewers, et id omne genus, mollified by their habits, or laboring under guilty consciences, have made but a feeble defence. Nor in all this is there anything new. It is as old as the knowledge of the "weed" among thinking men,- -in other words, about three centuries. The English adventurers under Drake and Raleigh and Hawkins, and the multitude of minor Protestant "filibusters" who followed in their train, had no sooner imported the habit of smoking tobacco, among the other outlandish customs which they brought home from the new Indies and the Spanish Main, than the higher powers rebuked the practice, which novelty and its own fascinations were rendering so fashion

--

able, in language more forcible than elegant. The philippic of King James is so apposite that we may be pardoned for transcribing one oft-quoted sentence:"But herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God's good gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath, being a good gift of God, should be wilfully corrupted by this stinking smoke. . . . . A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmfull to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof neerest resembling the horrible Stygian smoake of the pit that is bottomless.” *

The Popes Urban VIII. and Innocent XII. fulminated edicts of excommunication against all who used tobacco in any form; from which we may conclude that the new habit was spreading rapidly over Christendom. And not only the successors of St. Peter, but those also of the Prophet, denounced the practice, the Sultan Amurath IV. making it punishable with death. The Viziers of Turkey spitted the noses of smokers with their own

pipes; the more considerate Shah of Persia cut them entirely off. The knout greeted in Russia the first indulgence, and death followed the second offence. In some of the Swiss cantons smoking was considered a crime second only to adultery. Modern republics are not quite

a year. The King, however, had the sagacity to secure a preemption-right as early as 1620.

Yet how could the practice but have increased, when, as Malcolm relates the tradition, such men as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Hugh Middleton sat smoking at their doors?- for "the public manner in which it was exhibited, and the aromatic flavor inhaled by the passengers, exclusive of the singularity of the circumstance and the eminence of the parties," could hardly have failed to favor its dissemination.

The silver-tongued Joshua Sylvester hoped to aid the royal cause by writing a poem entitled, "Tobacco battered, and the pipes shattered, (about their ears who idly idolize so base and barbarous a weed, or at least-wise overlove so loathsome a vanity,) by a volley of holy shot thundered from Mount Helicon." If the smoothness of the verses equalled the euphony of the title, this must have proved a moving appeal.

Stow contents himself with calling tobacco " a stinking weed, so much abused to God's dishonor."

Burton exhausts the subject in a single paragraph. Ben Jonson, though a jolly good fellow, was opposed to the habit of smoking. But Spenser mentions "divine tobacco." Walton's "Piscator" indulges in a pipe at breakfast, and "Venator" has his tobacco brought from London to insure its purity. Sweet Izaak could have selected no more soothing minister than the pipe to the "contemplative man's recreation.”

As the new sedative gains in esteem, we find Francis Quarles, in his "Emblems," treating it in this serio-comic vein :

"Flint-hearted Stoics, you whose marble eyes Contemn a wrinkle, and whose souls despise To follow Nature's too affected fashion, Or travel in the regent walk of passion, — Whose rig.d hearts disdain to shrink at fears,

Or play at fast-and-loose with smiles and tears,

Come, burst your spleens with laughter to behold

A new-found vanity, which days of old
Ne'er knew, -a vanity that has beset
The world, and made more slaves than Ma-
homet,-

That has condemned us to the serv.le yoke
Of slavery, and made us slaves to smoke.
But stay! why tax I thus our modern
times

For new-born follies and for new-born crimes?

Are we sole guilty, and the first age free? No: they were smoked and slaved as well

as we.

What's sweet-lipped honor's blast, but smoke? what's treasure, But very smoke? and what's more smoke than pleasure?"

Brand gives us the whole matter in a nutshell, in the following quaint epigram, entitled "A Tobacconist," taken from an old collection:

"All dainty meats I do defy

Which feed men fat as swine;
He is a frugal man, indeed,
That on a leaf can dine.
"He needs no napkin for his hands
His fingers' ends to wipe,
That keeps his kitchen in a box,

And roast meat in a pipe." And so on, the singers of succeeding years, usque ad nauseam,—a loathing equalled only by that of the earlier writers for the plant, now so lauded.

Tobacco-worship seems to us to culminate in the following stanza from a German song:

"Tabak ist mein Leben,

Dem hab' ich mich ergeben, ergeben;
Tabak ist meine Lust.

Und eh' ich ihn sollt' lassen, Viel lieber wollt' ich hassen, Ja, hassen selbst eines Mädchens Kuss." As it is with your sex, my dear Madam, that this question of Tobacco is to be mainly argued,-for, to your honor be it spoken, you have always been of the reformatory party,-let us hope, that, provided you have not read or translated the last verse, you have recovered your natural amiability, ruffled perhaps by this odious subject, and are prepared to believe us when we tell you that these opposite opinions cannot be wholly reconciled, and to follow us patiently while

2

A DELICATE subject? Very true; and one which must be handled as tenderly as biscuit de Sèvres, or Venetian glass. Whichever side of the question we may assume, as the most popular, or the most right, the feelings of so large and respectable a minority are to be consulted, that it behooves the critic or reviewer to move cautiously, and, imitating the actions of a certain feline household reformer, to show only the patte de velours.

The omniscient Burton seems to have reached the pith of the matter. The two hostile sections of his proposition, though written so long since, would very well fit the smoker and the reformer of to-day. That portion of the world which is enough advanced to advocate reforms is entirely divided against itself on the subject of Tobacco. Immense interests, economical, social, and, as some conceive, moral, are arrayed on either side. The reformers have hitherto had the better of it in point of argument, and have pushed the attack with most vigor, yet with but trifling results. Smokers and chewers, et id omne genus, mollified by their habits, or laboring under guilty consciences, have made but a feeble defence. Nor in all this is there anything new. It is as old as the knowledge of the "weed" among thinking men,-in other words, about three centuries. The English adventurers under Drake and Raleigh and Hawkins, and the multitude of minor Protestant "filibusters" who followed in their train, had no sooner imported the habit of smoking tobacco, among the other outlandish customs which they brought home from the new Indies and the Spanish Main, than the higher powers rebuked the practice, which novelty and its own fascinations were rendering so fashion

able, in language more forcible than elegant. The philippic of King James is so apposite that we may be pardoned for transcribing one oft-quoted sentence: — "But herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God's good gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath, being a good gift of God, should be wilfully corrupted by this stinking smoke. . . . A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmfull to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof neerest resembling the horrible Stygian smoake of the pit that is bottomless." *

The Popes Urban VIII. and Innocent XII. fulminated edicts of excommunication against all who used tobacco in any form; from which we may conclude that the new habit was spreading rapidly over Christendom. And not only the successors of St. Peter, but those also of the Prophet, denounced the practice, the Sultan Amurath IV. making it punishable with death. The Viziers of Turkey spitted the noses of smokers with their own pipes; the more considerate Shah of Persia cut them entirely off. The knout greeted in Russia the first indulgence, and death followed the second offence. In some of the Swiss cantons smoking was considered a crime second only to adultery. Modern republics are not quite

So severe.

It is not to be supposed that in England the royal pamphlet had its desired effect. For we find that James laid many rigid sumptuary restrictions upon the practice which he abominated, based chiefly upon the extravagance it occasioned, the expenses of some smokers being estimated at several hundred pounds *Counterblast to Tobacco.

'differential energy,' as the Aristotelians say, his true distinction from the orangoutang. Ponder it well."

Query. What did the old Roman do without a cigar? How idle through the day? How survive his interminable post-canal potations?—The thought is not our own. It occurs somewhere in De Quincey, we believe. It is one of those self-evident propositions you wonder had not occurred to you before. -What an accessory of luxury the pipe would have been to him who passed the livelong day under the mosaic arches of the Therma! The strigiles would have vanished before the meerschaum, had that magic clay then been known. How completely would the hookah and the narghileh have harmonized with the crater, cyathi, and tripods of the triclinium in that portraiture of the "Decadence of Rome" which hangs in the Luxembourg Gallery! Poor fellows! they managed

to exist without them.

Though pipes are found carved on very old sculptures in China, and the habit of smoking was long since extensively followed there, according to Pallas, and although certain species of the tobacco-plant, as the Nicotiana rustica, would appear to be indigenous to the country, yet we have the best reason to conclude that America, if not the exclusive home of the herb, was the birthplace of its use by man. The first great explorer of the West found the sensuous natives of Hispaniola rolling up and smoking tobacco-leaves with the same persistent indolence that we recognize in the Cuban of the present day. Rough Cortés saw with surprise the luxurious Aztec composing himself for the siesta in the middle of the day as invariably as his fellow Dons in Castile. But he was amazed that the barbarians had discovered in tobacco a sedative to promote their reveries and compose them to sleep, of which the hidalgos were as yet ignorant, but which they were soon to appropriate with avidity, and to use with equal zest. Humboldt says that it had been cultivated by the people of Orinoco from time

immemorial, and was smoked all over America at the time of the Spanish Conquest, also that it was first discovered by Europeans in Yucatan, in 1520, and was there called Petum. Tobacco, according to the same authority, was taken from the word tabac, the name of an instrument used in the preparation of the herb.

Though Columbus and his immediate followers doubtless brought home specimens of tobacco among the other spoils of the New World, Jean Nicot, ambassador to Portugal from Francis II., first sent the seeds to France, where they were cultivated and used about the year 1560. In honor of its sponsor, Botany has named the plant Nicotiana tabacum, and Chemistry distinguished as Nicotin its active alkaloid. Sir Francis Drake first brought tobacco to England about 1586. It owed the greater part of its early popularity, however, to the praise and practice of Raleigh: his high standing and character would have sufficed to introduce still more novel customs. The weed once inhaled, the habit once acquired, its seductions would not allow it to be easily laid aside; and we accordingly find that royal satire, public odium, and ruinous cost were alike inadequate to restrain its rapidly increasing consumption. Somewhere about the year 1600 or 1601 tobacco was carried to the East, and introduced among the Turks and Persians, —it is not known by whom: the devotion of modern Mussulmans might reasonably ascribe it to Allah himself. It seems almost incredible that the Oriental type of life and character could have existed without tobacco. The pipe seems as inseparable as the Koran from the follower of Mahomet.

Barely three centuries ago, then, the first seeds of the Nicotiana tabacum germinated in European soil: now, who shall count the harvests ? Less than three centuries ago, Raleigh attracted a crowd by sitting smoking at his door: now, the humblest bog-trotter of Ireland must be poor indeed who cannot own or borrow a pipe. A little more than