The Mask of Flowers.
When Argall arrived in Virginia, he found that a new industry, at which sundry experiments had been made under Dale, was acquiring large dimensions and fast becoming established. Of all the gifts that America has vouchsafed to the Old World, the most widely acceptable has been that which a Greek punster might have called "the Bacchic gift," τὸ βακχικὸν δώρημα, tobacco. No other visible and tangible product of Columbus's discovery has been so universally diffused among all kinds and conditions of men, even to the remotest nooks and corners of the habitable earth. Its serene and placid charm has everywhere proved irresistible, although from the outset its use has been frowned upon with an acerbity such as no other affair of hygiene has ever called forth. The first recorded mention of tobacco is in Columbus's diary for November 20, 1492. The use of it was soon introduced into the Spanish peninsula, and about 1560 the French ambassador at Lisbon, Jean Nicot, sent some of the fragrant herb into France, where it was named in honour of him Nicotiana. It seems to have been first brought to England by Lane's returning colonists in 1586, and early in the seventeenth century it was becoming fashionable to smoke, in spite of the bull of Pope Urban VIII. and King James's "Counterblast to Tobacco." Every one will remember how that royal author characterized smoking as "a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." On Twelfth Night, 1614, a dramatic entertainment, got up by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn and called the Mask of Flowers, was performed before the king and queen at Whitehall. In it the old classic Silenus appears, jovial and corpulent, holding his goatskin wine-bag, and with him a novel companion, an American chieftain named Kawasha, dressed in an embroidered mantle cut like tobacco leaves, with a red cap trimmed with gold on his head, rings in his ears, a chain of glass beads around his neck, and a bow and arrows in his hand. These two strange worthies discuss the merits of wine and tobacco:—
Silenus.
Kawasha comes in majesty;
Was never such a god as he.
He's come from a far country
To make our nose a chimney.
Kawasha.
The wine takes the contrary way
To get into the hood;
But good tobacco makes no stay,
But seizeth where it should.
More incense hath burned at
Great Kawasha's foot
Than to Silen and Bacchus both,
And take in Jove to boot.
Silenus.
The worthies they were nine, 'tis true.
And lately Arthur's knights I knew,
But now are come up worthies new,
The roaring boys, Kawasha's crew.
Kawasha.
Silenus tops[89] the barrel, but
Tobacco tops the brain
And makes the vapours fine and soote,[90]
That man revives again,
Nothing but fumigation
Doth charm away ill sprites.
Kawasha and his nation
Found out these holy rites.[91]