(18 lines more. The Muses’ Cabinet, 1655, p. 13.)
The three pipes for two-pence was a cheapening of Tobacco since the days, not a century before, when for price it was weighed equally against gold. Our early friend Arthur Tennyson wrote in one of our (extant) Florentine sketch-books the following impromptu of his own:—
I walk’d by myself on the highest of hills,
And ’twas sweet, I with rapture did own;
As fish-like I opened unto it my gills
And gulp’d it in ecstasy down;
To feel it breathe over my bacca-boiled tongue,
That so much of its fragrance did need,
And brace up completely a system unstrung
For months with this Devil’s own Weed.