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 sacree, herbe propre a tous maux, panacee 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 “Faerie 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