of Barbarians and Indians! His Majesty kindly suggested that doctors
who believed in tobacco as a remedial agent should take themselves and
their medicine of pollution off to join the Indians.




III

TOBACCO TRIUMPHANT (_continued_)--SELLERS OF TOBACCO AND PROFESSORS OF
SMOKING--ABUSE AND PRAISE OF TOBACCO

This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow;
He lets me have good tobacco.

BEN JONSON, _The Alchemist_.


The druggists and other tradesmen who sold tobacco in Elizabethan and
Jacobean days had every provision for the convenience of their
numerous customers. Some so-called druggists, it may be shrewdly
suspected, did much more business in tobacco than they did in drugs.
Dekker tells us of an apothecary and his wife who had no customers
resorting to their shop "for any phisicall stuffe," but whose shop had
many frequenters in the shape of gentlemen who "came to take their
pipes of the divine smoake." That tobacco was often the most
profitable part of a druggist's stock is also clear from the last
sentence in Bishop Earle's character of "A Tobacco-Seller," one of the
shortest in that remarkable collection of "Characters" which the
Bishop issued in 1628 under the title of "Micro-Cosmographie."