Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/185

 BEN JONSON 169 " you know clearly beforehand That all which I shall say to you is sooth ; I am a most veracious person, and Totally unacquainted with untruth." Gifford notes that Bobadill had good authority for the epithet Divine ; and, indeed, for the whole of his panegyric. He quotes the famous passage in the " Faerie Queene " : — "There, whether it divine tobacco were, Or panacea, or polygony " — referring to the "sovereign weed" with which Bel- phoebe cured the sore wound of Prince Arthur's gentle Squire Timias (Book iii., canto v., st. 32, 33) : — "The soveraine weede betwixt two marbles plaine Shee pownded small, and did in peeces bruze ; And then atweene her lilly handes twaine Into his wound the juice thereof did scruze ; And round about, as she could well it uze, The flesh therewith she suppled and did steepe, T' abate all spasme, and soke the swelling bruze ; And, after having searcht the intuse deepe, She with her scarf did bind the wound from cold to keep." Surely a very pretty piece of feminine doctoring in the heart of the wild wood green. Gifford further notes that in his "Cosmography," Heylin, " no incompetent judge, perhaps, of this matter," says that the island of Trinidad abounds with the best kind of tobacco, much celebrated formerly by the name of a Pipe of I'rinidado. He knows not what species of tobacco was meant by nicotian, this having been originally, as now, a generic term. It might mean that grown in the