Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/230

 214 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES world ! How many of us love wit, and can take tobacco and drink ; but who will therefore give us two thousand pounds ? Echo answers, 'Ounds ! F.S. — Shakespeare and Snuff. — At the close of Section x., I promised to return to this subject, anent a note of Gifford. Consulting the " Complete Concordance to Shakespeare," New and Revised Edition, by Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke (London : W. Kent and Co., 1874), I find only the following references to snuff and snuffing : — Midsummer Night's Dream, v. i, 254. — " It is already in snuff." Love's Labour's Lost, v. 2, 22. — "The light, by taking it in snuff." All's Well that Ends Well, i. 2, 59.—" To be the snuff of younger spirits." I Henry LV,, i. 3, 41. — "Took it in snuff; and still he smiled." Liejiry VILL., iii. 2, 96. — " 'Tis I must snuff it ; then out it goes." Cymbeline, i. 6, 87. — " And solace i' the dungeon by a snuff?" King Lear, iii. i, 26. — " In snuffs and packings of the dukes." King Lear, iv. 6, 39. — " My snuff, and loathed part of nature." Hamlet, iv. 7, 116. — "A kind of wick, or snuff, that will." Love's Labour's Lost, iii. I, 16, — "Snuffed up love by smelling love." The numbers of the lines I have added from the Globe edition. Now, if the reader interested in this great question will look up the passages referred to, I think he will agree with me that in only a couple of them — the fourth, from i Henry IV., and the last, from Love's Labour's Lost, is there any possi- bility of allusion to the dust of tobacco. And even in these, I am afeared that a very little pondering