It is not the smack Of ale or of sack, That can with tobacco compare : For taste and for smell, It bears away the bell From them both, wherever they are: For all their bravado, It is Trinidado, That both their noses will wipe Of the praises they desire, Unless they conspire To sing to the tune of his pipe. The verse that has been written in the praise and dispraise of tobacco, would, of itself, fill a volume; but, among the quantity, no piece has been more enduringly popular than the song of Tobacco is an Indian weed. It has undergone a variety of changes (deteriorating rather than improving it), and through these it may be traced, from the reign of James I., down to the present day. The earliest copy I have seen (says Mr. Chappell, in his Popular Music of the Olden Time) is in a manuscript volume of poetry transcribed during James's reign, and which was most kindly lent to me by Mr. Payne Collier. It there bears the initials of G[eorge] W[ither], a very likely person to have written such a song. A courtier poet would not have sung the praises of smoking-so obnoxious to the King as to induce him to write a Counterblaste to Tobacco-but Wither despised the servility which would have tended to his advancement at court. "He could not refrain," says O had the gods known thy immortal smack, Wood, "from showing himself a Presbyterian satirist.” It was the publication of his Abuses stript and whipt which caused his committal to the Marshalsea prison. The following is Wither's song: "Why should we so much despise So good and wholesome an exercise Thus think, and drink tobacco. "The earthen pipe, so lily white, Shows that thou art a mortal wight; "And when the smoke ascends on high, Of worldly stuff-'tis gone with a puff : "And when the pipe is foul within, Think how the soul's defiled with sin - "Lastly, the ashes left behind May daily shew, to move the mind, That to ashes and dust return we must: Thus think, and drink tobacco." About 1670, we find several copies of Wither's song, but the first stanza changed in all, besides other minor variations. In Merry Drollery Complete (1670), it commences, "Tobacco, that is withered quite.' On broadsides, bearing date the same year, and having the tune at the top, the first line is, "The Indian weed withered quite." In 1669 it appeared in its present form, in the first volume of Pills to purge Melancholy, and so remained until 1719, when D'Urfey became editor of that collection, and transferred it, with others, to the third. The following is the song printed on the broadsides, and in the Pills : "Tobacco's but an Indian weed, Grows green at morn, cut down at eve, "The pipe, that is so lily white, Is broke with a touch-man's life is such : "The pipe, that is so foul within, Shews how man's soul is stain'd with sin, Think of this when you smoke tobacco. "The ashes that are left behind Think of this when you smoke tobacco. "The smoke, that does so high ascend, The vapour's gone-man's life is done : Think of this when you smoke tobacco." * Bishop Earle in his Micro-cosmography (1628), has this character of a tobacco-seller: "He is the only man * After the Pills, it was printed with alterations, and the addition of a very inferior second part, by the Rev. Ralph Erskine, a minister of the Scotch Church, in his Gospel Sonnets. This is the "Smoking Spiritualized," which is still in print among the ballad-vendors of Seven Dials, and a copy of which is contained in Songs and Ballads of the Peasantry of England, by J. H. Dixon, or the new edition by Robert Bell. In the Rev. James Plumptre's Collection of Songs (8vo, 1805), Tobacco is an Indian weed was adapted to a more modern tune by Dr. Hague; and about 1830, the late Samuel Wesley again re-set the words, to music of his own composition.-Chappell. that finds good in it which others brag of, but do not; for it is meat, drink, and clothes to him. No man opens his ware with greater seriousness, or challenges your judgment more in the approbation. His shop is the rendezvous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses, and their communication is smoak.* It is the only place where Spain is commended and preferred before England itself. He should be well experienced in the world, for he has daily trial of men's nostrils, and none is better acquainted with humours. He is the piecing commonly of some other trade, which is bawd to his tobacco, and that to his wife, which is the flame that follows this smoak.” In another part of his work our author says of a Tavern, "it is the torrid zone, that scorches the face, and tobacco the gun-powder that blows it up." Scattered in the diaries of this era we occasionally meet with a few notices of the prices of tobacco. Thus in the MS. notes made by Sir Henry Oglander of Nunwell in the Isle of Wight, in the year 1626 he records among other expenses, "for eight ounces of tobacco, five shillings:" he frequently puts down other sums for the same luxury, and in one of his letters to his son in London mentions his disappointment at not getting tobacco with other things ordered to come from the Capital. In the Journal of the Reverend Giles Moore, published by the Sussex Archæological Society (Vol. I. Transactions), he notes the * Minshew calls a tobacconist fumi-vendulus, a smoak-seller. payment in 1656 for "two ounces of tobacco, one shilling." The expense of the custom was one fertile source of objection to the "fragrant weed." We have heard the satirists declare it ruined the smaller gentry, and grave elders occasionally "put out the pipes" of fast young heirs by testamentary legislation. Thus the will of Peter Campbell, a Derbyshire gentleman in 1616,bequeathed all his household goods to his eldest son Roger; but if at any time his brothers or sisters "fynd him takeing of tobacco," he shall forfeit all, "or their full valew." Now, as he had five brothers and three sisters, he must have been well watched.* The "rigidly righteous were in those days as bitterly tyrannical on tobacco, as they still continue to be on any other practice that does not accord with their particular idiosyncracies. They prophesied as we have seen in the course of our researches, all sorts of evil and ruin to those who used tobacco. But there were not wanting some few who saw the ruin of England in the habit. In the Parliament of 1620 the member for Pontefract, Sir Edwin Sandys, summed up the evil thus: "There was wont to come out of Spain a great mass of money, to the value of £100,000 per annum, for our cloths and other merchandises; and now we have from thence for all our cloths and merchandises, nothing but tobacco: nay that will not pay for all the *Gent's Mag., April, 1769. |