Page:Elizabethan People.djvu/114

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78
THE ELIZABETHAN PEOPLE

the lungs of the tobacconist are rotted, the liver spotted, the brain smoked like the back side of the pig-woman's booth here, and the whole body within black as her pan you saw e'en now without."

In Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday we read, "Oh, fie upon it, Roger, perdy! These filthy tobacco pipes are the most idle, slavering baubles that ever I felt. Out upon it! God bless us, men look not like men that use them."

"By my little finger, I'll break all your pipes, and burn the case, and the box too, and you draw out your stinking smoke before me." (Dekker's Westward Ho.)

Beaumont and Fletcher are equally contemptuous. "Fie, this stinking tobacco kills me! Would there were none in England." (Knight of the Burning Pestle.) Middleton mentions the goldsmith and the tobacco seller as the two extremes; and Field, "Her fortune, O my conscience, would be to marry some tobacco man." (Amends for Ladies, iii. 1.)

The tobacco sold in that day must have been very dark if we may draw an inference from "faces far blacker than any ball of tobacco" a line from Nash's The Terrors of the Night, i. 139. It was the custom to hand one a pipe of tobacco already filled; and the phrase, "Will you take a