of London. Various schemes had also been entertained and some of them in part carried into effect, though they all failed in the end, for establishing English colonies in the island of Newfoundland, and on the eastern coast of South America. But, even at the close of this reign, the parent colony of Virginia was still far from being in a satisfactory state, or holding out a complete assurance of stability and ultimate success. One of the last acts of James's government was to commission a number of noblemen and gentlemen to make inquiry into the condition of that colony: the courses taken for settling which, his majesty declares, had not had the good effect intended—a previous commission having reported that most of the persons sent thither had either died by sickness and famine, or been massacred by the natives; and that such as still survived were in lamentable necessity and want; notwithstanding all which, however, the commissioners conceived the country to be both fruitful and healthful, and that, if industry were used, it would produce many good staple commodities, though, by the neglect of the governors and managers, it had as yet produced few or none.
There was one commodity now beginning to be raised in Virginia, their cultivation of which would hardly contribute to recommend the settlers to James's favour. A considerable portion of his majesty's literary fame rested upon his singular treatise entitled "A Counterblast to Tobacco," in which he assails the use of that herb with every form of pedantic invective. Not satisfied with this grand display of declamatory pyrotechnics, he issued, besides, in the course of his reign, a succession of royal proclamations in denunciation of tobacco, some of which are almost as tempestuous as his book. In 1604, while as yet all the tobacco imported came from the Spanish West Indies, he took it upon him, without the consent of parliament, to raise the duty upon it from twopence to six shillings and tenpence a pound, with the professed object of preventing the enormous inconveniences proceeding, as he declared, from the great quantity of the article daily brought into the realm. "Tobacco," says
