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A NEW COUNTERBLAST
"He that taketh tobacco saith he cannot 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 sacrée, herbe propre à tous maux, panacée 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 "Faërie 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 its climax in a century or two, and has since rather diminished than increased, in proportion to the population. It probably appeared in England in 1586, being first used in the Indian fashion, by handing one pipe from man to man throughout the company; the medium of communication being a silver tube for the higher classes, and a straw and walnut-shell for the baser sort. Paul Hentzner, who travelled in England in 1598, and Monsieur Misson, who wrote precisely a century later, note almost in the same words "a perpetual use of tobacco"; and the latter suspects that this is what makes "the generality of Englishmen so taciturn, so thoughtful, and so melancholy." In Queen Elizabeth's time, the ladies of the court "would not scruple to blow a pipe together very socially." In 1614 it was asserted that tobacco was sold openly in more than seven thousand places in London, some of these being already attended by that patient Indian who still stands seductive at tobacconists' doors. It was also estimated that the annual receipts of these establishments amounted to more than three hundred thousand pounds. Elegant ladies had their pictures painted, at least one in 1650 did, with pipe and box in hand. Rochefort, a rather apocryphal French traveller in 1672, reported it to be the general custom in English homes to set pipes on the table in the evening for the females as well as males of the family, and to provide children's luncheon-baskets with a well-filled pipe, to be smoked at school, under the directing eye of the master. In 1703, Lawrence Spooner wrote that "the sin of the kingdom in the intemperate use of tobacco swelleth and increaseth so daily that I can compare it to nothing but the waters of Noah, that swelled fifteen cubits above the highest mountains." The deluge reached its height in England—so thinks the amusing and indefatigable Mr. Fairholt, author of "Tobacco and its Associations"—in the reign of Queen Anne. Steele, in the "Spectator," (1711,) describes the snuff-box as a rival to the fan among ladies; and Goldsmith pictures the belles at Bath as entering the water in full bathing costume, each provided with a small floating basket, to hold a snuff-box, a kerchief, and a nosegay. And finally, in 1797, Dr. Clarke complains of the handing about of the snuff-box in churches during worship, "to the great scandal of religious people,"—adding, that kneeling in prayer was prevented by the large quantity of saliva ejected in all directions. In view of such formidable statements as these, it is hardly possible to believe that the present generation surpasses or even equals the past in the consumption of tobacco.
And all this sudden popularity was in spite of a vast persecution which sought to unite all Europe against this indulgence, in the seventeenth century. In Russia, its use was punishable with amputation of the nose; in Berne, it ranked next to adultery among offences; Sandys, the traveller, saw a Turk led through the streets of Constantinople mounted backward on an ass with a tobacco-pipe thrust through his nose. Pope Urban VIII., in 1624, excommunicated those who should use it in churches, and Innocent XII., in 1690, echoed the same anathema. Yet within a few years afterwards travellers reported that same free use of snuff in Romish worship which still astonishes spectators. To see a priest, during the momentous ceremonial of High Mass, enliven the occasion by a voluptuous pinch, is a sight even more astonishing, though perhaps less disagreeable, than the well-used spittoon which decorates so many Protestant pulpits.
But the Protestant pulpits did their full share in fighting the habit, for a time at least. Among the Puritans, no man could use tobacco publicly, on penalty of a fine of two and sixpence, or in a private dwelling, if strangers were present; and no two could use it together. That iron pipe of Miles Standish, still preserved at Plymouth, must have been smoked in solitude or not at all. This strictness was gradually relaxed, however, as the clergy took up the habit of smoking; and I have seen an old painting, on the panels of an ancient parsonage in Newburyport, representing a jovial circle of portly divines sitting pipe in hand around a table, with the Latin motto, "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." Apparently the tobacco was one of the essentials, since there was unity respecting that. Furthermore, Captain Underhill, hero of the Pequot War, boasted to the saints of having received his assurance of salvation "while enjoying a pipe of that good creature, tobacco," "since when he had never doubted it, though he should fall into sin." But it is melancholy to relate that this fall did presently take place, in a very flagrant manner, and brought discredit upon tobacco conversions, as being liable to end in smoke.
Indeed, some of the most royal wills that ever lived in the world have measured themselves against the tobacco-plant and been defeated. Charles I. attempted to banish it, and in return the soldiers of Cromwell puffed their smoke contemptuously in his face, as he sat a prisoner in the guard-chamber. Cromwell himself undertook it, and Evelyn says that the troopers smoked in triumph at his funeral. Wellington tried it, and the artists caricatured him on a pipe's head with a soldier behind him defying with a whiff that imperial nose. Louis Napoleon is said to be now attempting it, and probably finds his subjects more ready to surrender the freedom of the press than of the pipe.
The more recent efforts against tobacco, like most arguments in which morals and physiology are mingled, have lost much of their effect through exaggeration. On both sides there has been enlisted much loose statement, with some bad logic. It is, for instance, unreasonable to hold up the tobacco-plant to general indignation because Linnaeus classed it with the natural order Luridae,—since he attributed the luridness only to the color of those plants, not to their character. It is absurd to denounce it as belonging to the poisonous nightshade tribe, when the potato and the tomato also appertain to that perilous domestic circle. It is hardly fair even to complain of it for yielding a poisonous oil, when these two virtuous plants—to say nothing of the peach and the almond—will under sufficient chemical provocation do the same thing. Two drops of nicotine will, indeed, kill a rabbit; but so, it is said, will two drops of solanine. Great are the resources of chemistry, and a well-regulated scientific mind can detect something deadly almost anywhere.