In the Collection of Songs by the Wits of the Age, appended to _Le Prince d’Amour_, 1660, (but on broadsheet, 1641) we find the following far-superior lyric on TOBACCO. _To feed on Flesh is Gluttony,_ _It maketh men fat like swine._ _But is not he a frugal Man_ _That on a leaf can dine!_ _He needs no linnen for to foul,_ _His fingers ends to wipe,_ _That hath his Kitchin in a Box,_ _And roast meat in a Pipe._ _The cause wherefore few rich mens sons_ _Prove disputants in Schools,_ _Is that their fathers fed on flesh,_ _And they begat fat fools._ _This fulsome feeding cloggs the brain,_ _And doth the stomack cloak;_ _But he’s a brave spark that can dine_ _With one light dish of smoak._ _Audi alterem partem!_ Five years earlier (May 28th, 1655), William Winstanley had published “A Farewell to Tobacco,” beginning:— _Farewell thou Indian smoake, Barbarian vapour,_ _Enemy unto life, foe to waste paper,_ _Thou dost diseases in thy body breed,_ _And like a Vultur on the purse doth feed._ _Changing sweet breaths into a stinking loathing,_ _And with 3 pipes turnes two pence into nothing;_ _Grim ~Pluto~ first invented it, I think,_ _To poison all the world with hellish stink_, &c. (18 lines more. _The Muses’ Cabinet_, 1655, p. 13.) The three pipes for two-pence was a cheapening of Tobacco since the days, not a century before, when for price it was weighed equally against gold. Our early friend Arthur Tennyson wrote in one of our (extant) Florentine sketch-books the following _impromptu_ of his own:— _I walk’d by myself on the highest of hills,_ _And ’twas sweet, I with rapture did own;_ _As fish-like I opened unto it my gills_ _And gulp’d it in ecstasy down;_ _To feel it breathe over my bacca-boiled tongue,_ _That so much of its fragrance did need,_ _And brace up completely a system unstrung_ _For months with this ~Devil’s own Weed~._ But even so early as 1639, Thomas Bancroft had printed, (written thirteen years before) in his _First Booke of Epigrammes_, the following, ON TOBACCO TAKING. _The Old Germans, that their Divinations made_ _From Asses heads upon hot embers laid,_ _Saw they but now what frequent fumes arise_ _From such dull heads, what could they prophetize_ _But speedy firing of this worldly frame,_ _That seemes to stinke for feare of such a flame._ (_Two Bookes of Epigrammes_, No. 183, sign. E 3.)