Tobacco had many enemies to contend with. In 1610, the smoking of tobacco was known at Constantinople, but it was thought so injurious a custom, that to remove it by ridicule, a Turk who had been found smoking, was conducted about the streets with a pipe transfixed through his nose: it was a long time before the Dutch cultivated the plant themselves; previous to that period they purchased it, and that the very refuse of the English. In 1615, tobacco began to be sown about Amsfort in Holland. By James I. the practice of smoking was severely and most whimsically denounced in a work, called “_King James the Sixth’s_ (of Scotland) _Counterblast to Tobacco_,” in which the royal pedant states, “that some gentlemen of his courts were accustomed to expend no less than three or four hundred pounds a year upon this indulgence.” He also says, “that it was used as a powerful aphrodisiac.” He particularly deplores the case of delicate, wholesome, clean complexioned wives, whose husbands were not ashamed to pollute them with the _perpetual stinking torment_ of tobacco smoke: the concluding sentence of this extraordinary composition is somewhat laughable. “The use of tobacco,” he says, “is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrid Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” Few would wish to withhold from a Dutchman the narcotic enjoyment of his pipe, when they reflect, that he seeks no other species of oblivion to his care; for, I believe, notwithstanding a Dutchman’s eulogium upon his pipe, that it produces more oblivion than inspiration: he is scarcely ever seen intoxicated: indeed, drunkenness is held unpardonably infamous in Holland. To keep bad accounts, and to be seen inebriated, are equally disgraceful; and hence the use of wines and spirituous liquors is much less in Holland than in England. The Dutch agree with Cassio’s reasoning: ——“Oh! that men should put an enemy into their mouths, to steal away their brains! That we should with joy, revel, pleasure, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!” _Othello_, Act II. Scene 3. The spill-houses are not the only objectionable instances of the abuse of the government; the police master is suffered to misuse his authority to a shameful excess. Instead of bringing delinquents to justice, he is in the frequent habit of privately compromising public offence, and putting the sum paid into his own pocket. Some time before I was in Rotterdam, a burgher who had been guilty of adultery, paid twenty thousand guilders to this minister of justice, who thus partaking of the commercial spirit of his country, becomes a merchant in delinquency.