"'_Bobadil._ Sir, believe me upon my relation,--for what I tell you the world shall not reprove. I have been in the Indies where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen more of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only. Therefore, it cannot be but 'tis most divine. Further, take it, in the true kind, so, it makes an antidote, that had you taken the most deadly poisonous plant in all Italy, it should expel it and clarify you with as much ease as I speak. And for your greenwound, your balsamum, and your St. John's-wort, are all mere gulleries and trash to it, especially your Trinidado: your Nicotian is good too. I could say what I know of it for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours, crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this kind, but I profess myself no quack-salver: only thus much, by Hercules; I do hold it, and will affirm it before any prince in Europe, to be the most sovereign and precious weed that ever the earth tendered to the use of man.' _Cob._ "'By gad's me, I mar'l what pleasure or felicity they have in taking this roguish tobacco! It's good for nothing but to choke a man and fill him full of smoke and embers. There were four died out of one house last week with taking of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight; one of them, they say, will ne'er 'scape it: he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward and downward. By the stocks! an' there were no wiser men than I, I'd have it present whipping, man or woman that should but deal with a tobacco-pipe; why, it will stifle them all in the end, as many as use it; it's little better than rats-bane or rosaker.'"[40] [Footnote 40: A preparation of arsenic.] From the first announcement that English navigators had discovered tobacco in Virginia, until the London and Plymouth companies sailed for the New World, the deepest interest was taken in the voyagers. Drayton, the poet, wrote of "The Virginian Voyage," while Chapman and other dramatists wrote plays in which allusions were made to Virginia. In the "Mask of Flowers," performed at White Hall upon Twelfth Night, 1613-14, one of the characters challenges another, and asserts that wine is more worthy than tobacco. The costumes were exceedingly grotesque and suggestive of the New rather than of the Old World. Kawosha one of the principal characters rode in, wearing on his head a cap of red-cloth of gold, from his ears were pendants, a glass chain was about his neck, his body and legs were covered with olive-colored stuff, in his hands were a bow and arrows, and the bases of tobacco--colored stuff cut like tobacco leaves. The play abounds with allusions to the "Indian weed."