he goes so far as to give “10 precepts in the use of” tobacco.  The sixth is “that you drink not between the taking of the fumes, as our idle and smoakie Tobacconists are wont”—­there must be no alliance, in short, between the pipe and the cheerful glass.  The tenth and last precept is “that you goe not abroad into the aire presently [immediately] upon the taking of the fume, but rather refrain therefrom the space of halfe an houre, or more, especially if the season be cold, or moist.”  The suggestion that the smoker, when he has finished his pipe, shall wait for half an hour or so before he ventures into the outer air is very quaint.

Venner goes on to give a terrible catalogue of the ills that will befall the smoker who uses tobacco “contrary to the order and way I have set down.”  It is a dreadful list which may possibly have frightened a few nervous smokers; but probably it had no greater effect than the terrible curse in the “Jackdaw of Rheims.”

Another tract which may be classed with Venner’s “Treatise” was the “Nepenthes or the Vertues of Tobacco,” by Dr. William Barclay, which was published at Edinburgh in 1614.  This is sometimes referred to and quoted, as by Fairholt, as if it were a whole-hearted defence of tobacco-taking.  But Barclay enlarges mainly on the medicinal virtues of the herb.  “If Tabacco,” he says, “were used physically and with discretion there were no medicament in the worlde comparable to it”; and again:  “In Tabacco there is nothing which is not medicine, the root, the stalke, the leaves, the seeds, the smoake, the ashes.”  The doctor gives sundry directions for administering tobacco—­“to be used in infusion, in decoction, in substance, in smoke, in salt.”  But Barclay clearly does not sympathize with its indiscriminate use for pleasure.  “As concerning the smoke,” he says, “it may be taken more frequently, and for the said effects, but always fasting, and with emptie stomack, not as the English abusers do, which make a smoke-boxe of their skull, more fit to be carried under his arme that selleth at Paris dunoir a noircir to blacke mens shooes then to carie the braine of him that can not walke, can not ryde except the Tabacco Pype be in his mouth.”  He goes on to say that he was once in company with an English merchant in Normandy—­“betweene Rowen and New-haven”—­who was a merry fellow, but was constantly wanting a coal to kindle his tobacco.  “The Frenchman wondered and I laughed at his intemperancie.”

It is a little curious, considering the devotion of latter-day men of letters to tobacco, that in their early days so many of the men who wrote on the subject attacked the social use of tobacco with violence and virulence.  Perhaps, courtier-like, they followed the lead of the British Solomon, King James I. Their titles are characteristic of their style.  A writer named Deacon published in 1616 a quarto entitled “Tobacco tortured in the filthy Fumes of Tobacco refined”; but Joshua Sylvester had easily surpassed this when he wrote his “Tobacco Battered and the Pipes Shattered about their Eares, that idely Idolize so base and barbarous a Weed, or at least overlove so loathsome a Vanity, by a Volley of Holy Shot Thundered from Mount Helicon,” 1615.  Controversialists of that period rejoiced in full-worded titles and in full-blooded praise or abuse.