antidote to all poison; that it expelled rheums, sour humours, and obstructions of all kinds, and healed wounds better than St. John's wort. Some doctors were of opinion it would heal gout and the ague, neutralise the effects of drunkenness, and remove weariness and hunger.

The poor, on the other hand, not disinclined to be envious and detracting when judging rich men's actions, laughed at men who made chimneys of their throats, or who sealed up their noses with snuff. Ben Jonson makes that dry, shrewd, watercarrier of his, Cob, rail at the "roguish tobacco:" he would leave the stocks for worse men, and make it present whipping for either man or woman who dealt with a tobacco-pipe. Trinidado is little better than ratsbane or rosaker, he says, and those who use it deserve to be stifled with it. It chokes men, says the wrathful humorist, and fills them with smoke, embers, and soot. "There were four died out of one house last week," he says, "with taking it; and two more the bell went for yesterday. One of them, they say, will never 'scape it; he voided a bushel of soot yesterday upwards and downwards."

But King James, in his inane Counterblast, is more violent than even Cob. He calls it "a vile and stinking custom" borrowed from the beastly slavish Indians-poor, wild, barbarous men brought over from America, and not introduced by any worthy, virtuous, or great personage. He argues that tobacco is not dry and hot, that its smoke is humid, like all other smoke; and is therefore bad for the brain, which is naturally wet and cold. He denies that smoking purges the head or stomach, and declares that many have smoked themselves to death.

He argues that to use this unsavoury smoke is to be guilty of a worse sin than that of drunkenness, and asks how men, who cannot go a day's journey without sending for hot coals to kindle their tobacco, can be expected to endure the privations of war.

a stink

cleanly of men) closes his denunciations with this tremendous broadside of invective:

"Have you not reason, then," he says, "to be aanred and to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so foolishly received, and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? To your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming yourself both in person and goods, and taking also thereby the notes and marks of vanity upon you by the custom thereof, making yourselves to be wondered at by all foreign civil nations and by all strangers that come among you, and be scorned, and contemned; a custom brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking both fulsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smelle of the pit that is bottomless."

Such quotations as these are surely sufficient to convince even those comparatively unread in Elizabethan literature how much interest the new fashion excited in the minds of courtier and dramatist, king and peasant. Why then did Shakespeare refrain from any mention of the "excellent Trinidado? I can imagine only two reasons. 1. Our great poet may have aimed at a certain idealism, and have thought the new fashion too trivial and ephemeral to deserve notice.

2. As a prudent manager and courtier (for did he not eulogise Elizabeth extravagantly in Henry VIII., and almost fulsomely in Midsummer's Night's Dream, and James I. in Macbeth?), he may have thought it unwise to praise a custom detested by the king, who once said that if the devil came to visit him he could entertain him with nothing more suitable than a dish of ling, a loin of pork, and a pipe of tobacco afterwards for digestion. I hope some of my fellow-readers will supply a better solution of my difficulty.

I hope in the next number of "N. &Q." to publish a few remarks on Shakespeare's silence about Scotchmen and silver forks; incongruous topics, but interesting, because they are not yet threadbare. WALTER THORNBURY. Fonthill, Wilts.

PROSPECTUS OF "THE TIMES." "If I desired to leave to remote posterity some memorial of existing British civilisation, I would prefer not our docks, not our railroads, not our public buildings, not even the palace in which we now hold our sittings-I would prefer a file of The Times newspaper."-Speech of Sir E. L. Bulwer.

Lastly, he pleads the expense, some gentlemen bestowing three or four hundred a-year upon this precious stink. He considers it also an abuse of God's gifts to pollute the breath, and a cruelty for a man to vex his wife, with such " ing torment." Smoking, the angry and fuming king protests, had made our manners as rude as The history of THE TIMES newspaper is the those of the fish-wives of Dieppe. Smokers, tos-history of English journalism: which again, is the sing pipes and puffing smoke over the dinnertable, forgot all cleanliness and modesty. Men now, he says, cannot welcome a friend but straight they must be in hand with tobacco. He that refused a pipe in company was accounted peevish and unsociable. "Yea," says the royal coxcomb and pedant," the mistress cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco."

The royal reformer (not the most virtuous or

history of our social progress and material development. Our readers therefore will, we are sure, peruse with some interest the original Prospectus; in which the energetic John Walter, to whom the newspaper world owes so much, announced that, in consequence "of the numerous attempts to foist other newspapers in the room of the Universal Register," that paper would, on and after the 1st January next [1788], be published under the title of The Times.

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READERS

THE

'HE repeated complaints that have been made by the friends and supporters of the UNIVERSAL REGISTER, fince its first establishment, of the difficulty of obtaining that Paper from fome of the News-Carriers—the various attempts to foist other News-papers in its room, and the facility of those mistakes which have fo frequently occurred under the circumstance of the word Register being annexed to fo many other publications, have determined the Proprietors on the adoption of a measure, which they conceive will obviate fuch impofitions on their friends in future.

In this measure they comply with numerous and refpectable folicitations; and therefore agree to add a first Title to the Paper.

This is not in the affectation of mere novelty in name; but with a view to rescue from the base arts of subterfuge and imposition a News-paper hitherto fupported by a generous and discerning Public, and amply established in general estimation, in spite of the envious efforts of interested competitors, whose annual emoluments, it is confessed, may have felt no inconfiderable diminution from the fuccefs of the Universal Register, and the illiberal opposition of narrowminded enemies to the infant art of LOGOGRAPHY, of which it was the first periodical production.

In order as well to obviate every minute cause through which the Public may be imposed on by the agents of other Prints, as that a Paper, ever devoted to their information and amusement on every fubject, useful or interesting, may stand distinguished by a Title, at once more laconic, and comprehensive of its defign, and lefs apt to be mistaken for another; the Public are respectfully informed, that on and after the 1st of January next, it will be published under the Title of

TIMES;

ΤΗΕ ΤΙ

O R,

DAILY UNIVERSAL REGISTER.

-Silent con

The Directors are aware of the scope that envy and malevolence will assume for perverfion and mifrepresentation from the Titular change. tempt is the only notice fuch attacks can claim, or fhall meet.

To that Public, with whom merit alone muft form the criterion of their deferts, the Directors will make no promises of literary miracles; nor will they,