"The luckless fate of inventors and originators has become proverbial, but the ingenious individual whose nostrils rejoiced in the first pinch of snuff stood in no need of the niggardly praise of contemporaries or the lavish gratitude of posterity. That first 'pinch' was its own priceless reward, far above present appreciation or future fame. What matters it, that his great name has not been reverently handed down to us: that posterity seeks in vain his honored tomb, on which to hang her grateful votive wreath; that zealous antiquaries have raised up innumerable pretenders to his unclaimed honors, and striven to rob him of his fame? Enough for that lucky inventor, wherever he may rest, that he enjoyed in his lifetime the reward for which ordinary benefactors of their kind are fain to look to the future. "It is perfectly vain to attempt now to penetrate into the mystery which envelopes the name and nation of the first snuff-taker: long before rough, noble-hearted Drake cured his dyspepsia by the use of tobacco, or Raleigh transplanted some roots of that precious weed into English soil, there were European noses which had rejoiced at its pulverized leaves. Conjecture, lost in the mazy distance, gladly lays hold of something substantial in the shape of snuff's first royal patron. This was Catherine de Medicis, who, receiving some seeds of the tobacco plant from a Dutch colony, cherished them, and elevated the dried and pounded leaves into a royal medicine, with the proud title of 'Herbe a la Reine.' For in the beginning men took snuff, not as an everyday luxury, but as a medicament. Like tea--which a hundred years later was advertised as a cure for every ill--the new sneezing powder was hailed a universal specific; and so pleasant in its operation, that mankind, acting upon the wholesome aphorism that prevention is much better than cure, and eagerly anticipated the disease it was supposed to remedy."