V. _Modified by Tobacco._—A variety of drunkenness is excited by tobacco. This luxury was introduced into Europe from the New World, in 1559, by a Spanish gentleman, named Hernandez de Toledo, who brought a small quantity into Spain and Portugal. From thence, by the agency of the French ambassador at Lisbon, it found its way to Paris, where it was used in the form of powder by Catherine de Medicis, the abandoned instigator of the massacre of the Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s day. This woman, therefore, may be considered the inventor of snuff, as well as the contriver of that most atrocious transaction. It then came under the patronage of the Cardinal Santa Crocé, the Pope’s nuncio, who returning from his embassy at the Spanish and Portuguese courts, carried the plant to his own country, and thus acquired a fame little inferior to that which, at another period, he had won by piously bringing a portion of the _real_ cross from the Holy Land. It was received with general enthusiasm in the Papal States, and hardly less favourably in England, into which it was introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1585. It was not, however, without opposition that it gained a footing either in this country or in the rest of Europe. Its principal opponents were the priests, the physicians, and the sovereign princes: by the former, its use was declared sinful; and in 1624, Pope Urban VIII. published a bull, excommunicating all persons found guilty of taking snuff when in church. This bull was renewed in 1690 by Pope Innocent; and about twenty-nine years afterwards, the Sultan Amurath IV. made smoking a capital offence, on the ground of its producing infertility. For a long time smoking was forbidden in Russia, under the pain of having the nose cut off: and in some parts of Switzerland, it was likewise made a subject of public prosecution—the public regulations of the Canton of Berne, in 1661, placing the prohibition of smoking in the list of the ten commandments, immediately under that against adultery. Nay, that British Solomon, James I., did not think it beneath the royal dignity to take up his pen upon the subject. He accordingly, in 1603, published his famous “Counterblaste to Tobacco,” in which the following remarkable passage occurs:—“It is a custom loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”[17] But notwithstanding this regal and sacerdotal wrath, the plant extended itself far and wide, and is at this moment the most universal luxury in existence.