Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/187

BEN JONSON 171 Mathew exclaiming : " By this air, the most divine tobacco that ever I drunk" — drinking tobacco being then a common phrase for smoking it. One of Gilford's examples, from the " Scourge of Folly " by Davies, may be worth citing here : — " Fumosus cannot eat a bit, but he Must drink tobacco, so to drive it down." Just SO Lane tells us of the modern Egyptians, that the terms they use for " smoking tobacco " mean " drinking smoke," or " drinking tobacco." Poor Cob is beaten by Bobadill for vilifying the divine tobacco, and in a soliloquy of pathetic in- dignation, declares that it would not have grieved him had it not been his guest; one for whom, among other things, his wife Tib had "sold almost all my platters to buy him tobacco : " — your right Trini- dado, O sumptuous Bobadill ! Cob applies for a warrant to the merry old magistrate, Justice Clement, who at first pretends that instead of granting it he will send poor Cob to prison. ' ' What ! a threadbare rascal, a beggar, a slave . . . and he to deprave and abuse the virtue of an herb so generally received in the courts of princes, the chambers of nobles, the bowers of sweet ladies, the cabins of soldiers I " Wherewith we may close the subject so far as concerns "Every Man in his Humour." It is noted that " much of what occurs in Jonson on the subject of tobacco, was written before the death of Elizabeth, who had no objection, good lady, to this or anything else which promoted the commerce, and assisted the revenues of her kingdom."