Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/206

ipO BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES and Snuff-Taker's Companion" (London : Effingham Wilson, 1832), by Henry James Meller, Esq., that snuff-taking was very rare, and indeed very little known in England, being chiefly a luxurious habit among foreigners residing here, and a few English gentry who had travelled abroad, until 1702, when the expedition sent out under Sir George Rooke and the Duke of Ormond, to make a descent on Cadiz, captured among other rich booty several thousand barrels and casks of the finest snuffs of Spanish manufacture, and immense quantities of gross snuff from Havana, in bales, bags, and scrows (untanned hides of buffaloes sown with thongs of the same). The whole quantity taken was estimated at fifty tons' weight ; and much of this being sold by the captors at a very low price, snuff-taking soon became a popu- lar custom and fashion. XI We are now at the culmination of Jonson's genius, "The Alchemist" (16 10; ceL 37, about which age so many of the illustrious culminate or perish) ; and here we meet Abel Drugger, a tobacco man, one of the favourite parts of Garrick. This masterpiece of comedy, admirable in all respects, is not least admir- able for its construction, a department in which nearly all our really great dramatists and novelists have been so poor (Fielding, particularly in " Tom Jones," is a shining exception) that they have been driven to beg, borrow, or steal, or fail. In "The Alchemist" we have a thoroughly original plot, full of vigorous and