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.

Nor is it safe to assume, as many do, that tobacco predisposes very powerfully to more dangerous dissipations.  The non-smoking Saxons were probably far more intemperate in drinking than the modern English; and Lane, the best authority, points out that wine is now far less used by the Orientals than at the time of the “Arabian Nights,” when tobacco had not been introduced.  And in respect to yet more perilous sensual excesses, tobacco is now admitted, both by friends and foes, to be quite as much a sedative as a stimulant.