Chapter VIII: 142

STRAY LEAVES FROM THE INDIAN WEED

The late Poet Laureate’s (Tennyson) love of
tobacco-smoking—Science detects poisonous elements in the
exotic—The philosophy of smoking—The only thing in life that
fumes without fretting and assuages the fretful—The bachelor’s
love of seclusion with his pipe—Napoleon’s first and last
attempt at smoking—A distraught youth and an Oriental sage,
an eastern view of the virtue of the weed—Raleigh and the New
World—His expedition to explore the coast of the El Dorado and
win renown for England and his idolized Queen Bess—England’s
first smokers—Hawkins, not Raleigh, the first to bring tobacco
to this country—Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth—The wager as to
the weight of the smoke exhaled from a pipeful of tobacco—King
James’s ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco’—Its home cultivation
and manufacture—Ben Jonson’s ‘Alchemist’—‘Bartholomew
Faire’—Dr. Barclay on sophistication of tobacco—Old Rome
smoked coltsfoot and leaves of the lettuce—Paper warfare over
the virtues or vices of the Indian weed—Joshua Sylvester
sends a ‘volley of holy shot’ against the ‘idolatrous
weed’—Samuel Rowland’s ‘Knave of Clubbs,’ a humorous satire on
tobacco-smoking—Eastern potentates’ treatment of smokers of
the Frankish novelty—Russian atrocities inflicted on users of
the weed—Foreign Governments begin to see in it an easy means
of augmenting revenue—Peter the Great invites English tobacco
merchants to Moscow in order to establish a factory there for
the manufacture of tobacco—Queen Anne in Council disapproves
of the scheme, and orders our Envoy to destroy the works and
return the workmen to their homes.