Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/231

BEN JONSON 215 will snuff out or puff away this poor possibility. The former is in Hotspur's account of the dainty lord who pestered him after Holmedon fight : — " He was perfumed like a milliner ; And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held A pouncet-box, which ever and anon He gave his nose and took't away again ; Who therewith angry when it next came there, Took it in snuff; " A pouncet-box is a box for holding perfume, such as was in use long before the blessed powder of tobacco was know^n in our hemisphere. " Took it in snuff," is, indeed, a pun : to take in snuff, meaning to take offence, as well as to take by snuffing up. In brief, snuff and snuffing [German, schnupfen, " to draw into the nose," in die nase ziehen were familiar in our language of old, and tobacco-dust and the inhaling thereof were named from them, not vice versa; the general being made specific in honour of the most aromatic, stimulating, brain-clearing, and popular of all the triturated titillants of the olfactory nerves : snuff is the snuff, as tobacco the weed, and, as in the East, the same word means smoke and tobacco. In French, German, Spanish, and Italian alike, our snuff par excellence is distinguished as powder of tobacco, the great word " tobacco " being, with various spellings, common to all. These remarks dispose of the other passage. I am thus compelled to decide against Gif- ford, and in favour of myself, when I wrote, " Many of the characters (Shakespeare's) are continually taking snuff, but this does not appear to have been supplied by the tobacconist."