Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/183

 BEN JONSON 167 Beginning with the first published play, "Every Man in his Humour," who is the great smoker therein ? Who but Captain Bobadill ? — the renowned, the valiant, the modest, the veracious, the irresistible swordsman, who with nineteen other blades as good, or nearly as good as his own, will settle for you an army of forty thousand. We first discover this great captain in his room in the house of Cob the water- bearer, to which mean lodging we might fancy him reduced by that evil fortune which so frequently attends surpassing merit, were he not careful to let us know that he merely hides there because he would not be too popular, and generally visited as some are. Of course Cob is fascinated by his lodger : "Oh, my guest is a fine man ! . . . Oh, I have a guest — he teaches me — he does swear the legiblest of any man christened : By Saint George ! the foot of Pharaoh I the body of me ! as I am a gentleman and a soldier I — such dainty oaths ! and withal he does take this same filthy roguish tobacco, the finest and cleanliest : it would do a man good to see the fume come forth at's tonnel's." As tonnels is doubtless classic Cobbian for nostrils, or, as Spenser writes it, nosethrills, we learn what was then one fashionable point in smok- ing. Our veteran goes forth with his visitor, Master Mathew, the Town Gull, to a breakfast whose fine frugaUty may be partly due to the fact that Mathew has not past a two shillings or so about him. Here is a bill of fare to shame gluttons : " Come ; we will have a bunch of radish and salt to taste our wine, and a pipe of tobacco to close the orifice of the stomach," Only this, and nothing more! as Poe sings, not without tautology. Was it on such a diet