that our hero built up what the angry Downright terms, "that huge tumbrel-slop," and "Gargantua breech?"
We now come to Scene 2, Act iii., of which the last part is specially devoted to the glorification of tobacco. The great Bobadill asks for a light, and exclaims: "Body o' me! here's the remainder of seven pound since yesterday was seven-night. 'Tis your right, Trinidado: Did you never take any, Master Stephen?"
"Stephen (a country gull).—No, truly, sir; but I'll learn to take it now, since you commend it so.
Bobadill.—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 nature, 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 green wound, 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 the virtue of it, for the expulsion of rheums, raw humours, crudities, obstructions, with a thousand of this kind; but I profess myself no quacksalver. Only this 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."
There is a panegyric for you, and coming from such a reticent warrior! and one, moreover, who could declare with not less assurance than that Divine rogue Mercury in the glorious Greek hymn Shelley so gloriously translated:—
