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 fashionable, 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."[a]

[Footnote a:  Counterblast to Tobacco.]

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 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.