For she of herbs had great intendiment, Taught of the Nymph which from her infancy Her nursed had in true nobility: There, whether it divine Tobacco were, Or Panachea, or Polygony, She found and brought it to her patient dear, Who all this while lay bleeding out his heart-blood near. In a similar vein William Lyly, Queen Elizabeth’s court-poet, speaks of the weed in his play entitled _The Woman in the Moone_. Pandora, having wounded a lover with a spear, urges her attendant to gather … Balm and cooling violets, And of our holy herb nicotian, And bring withal pure honey from the hive, To heal the wound of my unhappy hand. Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and a host of other playwrights and pamphleteers found in the new indulgence a source of endless amusement, and belaboured ‘Tobacconists’ with rare sallies of wit and humour. Authors learned in the materia medica of those days tell of wonderful cures wrought by this _Sana Sancta Indorum_. In a booklet bearing the rather droll title of _Dyet’s Dry Dinner_ (1599) Henry Buttes informs the reader that ‘Tobacco cureth any grief, dolour, imposture, or obstruction proceeding of cold or wind, especially in the head or breast. The fume taken in a pipe is good against rumes, hoarseness, ache in the head, stomach, lungs, breast, etc., also in want of meat, drink, sleep, or rest.’ The dyspeptic and the sleepless are invited to banquet upon a dry dinner, and they will assuredly find in the pipe a never-failing remedy for their several ailments. The uplifted author feels himself impelled to give expression to his high appreciation of the new regimen in verse, and exclaims, Fruit, herbs, flesh, fish, whitemeats, spice, sauce, all, Concoct are by Tobacco’s Cordiall! Proceeding with his description of a dry dinner and elaborating many mysterious complications of the human system and their complete removal by the use of tobacco, he says that he ‘names his book, _Dyet’s Dry Dinner_, not only _Caminum Prandium_, without wine, but _Accipritinum_, without all drink, except tobacco, which also is but dry drink.’ And as to the first introduction of tobacco into this kingdom, he informs us that it was ‘translated out of the Indies in the seed or root, native or sative in our own fruit-fullest soil. The Indian name for the plant is Peicelt, surnamed tobacco, by the Spaniards of the Ile Tabago. Yet we are not beholden to their tradition. Our English Ulisses, renowned Syr Walter Rawleigh, a man admirably excellent in navigation and Nature’s privy counsell, and infinitely read in the wide boke of the worlde, hath both farre fetcht it and deare bought it, the estimate of which I leave to other; yet this all know, since it came into request, there hath been _Magnus Fumi Questus_; and _Fumi-Vendulus_ is the best Epithite for an Apothecary.’