Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 12.djvu/551

 10 s. xii. DEO. 4, 1909.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

455

Perhaps Charles Kingsley had the old phrase in his mind when he wrote of Yeo near the end of the seventh chapter of
 * ' drinking down the smoke " of his tobacco
 * Westward Ho ! >

I venture to add some extracts from the quaint little book called ' Dyets Dry Dinner, 1 though they are not quite germane to the question :

" Hence it is that we perfume and aire our bodies with Tabacco smoake (by drying) pre- serving them from putrefaction." ' Epistle Dedi- catorie to Richard Thekeston, Esquire, and Elynor his Wife,' near the end.

Fruit, Herbs, Flesh, Whit-meats, Spice,

Concoct are by Tabaccos cordiall.

' The Authors Method comprised in Verse,' by Samuel Wallsall.

Gainst common ills these writtes came well me

seemd

What Well is come, Well may be Welcome deemd. These with Cates, Delices, Tabacc o, Mell : Shew to Fare well : bring Well-fare ; thus Fare-well. " The same man " (apparently Wallsall) in praise of this learned witty Booke."

ROBERT PIERPOINT.

Sir Walter Ralegh certainly " drank " to- bacco, and the quotations in the ' N.E.D.* show that this usage was common through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The original phrase was " to drink the smoke," in old French " boire la fumee. J1 In the eighteenth century the locution appears to be felt as an archaism. I believe it is no longer current in the West of Europe, but it survives in the Slavonic and other Eastern European tongues. In Slovenian the phrase is tobak piti, in Croatian duhan piti, in Rou- manian bea tutun, in Turkish tutun ichmek. JAS. PLATT, Jun.

The expression " drinking tobacco " for " smoking tobacco "' is used throughout the whole of Hausaland in Africa, inhabited entirely by negroes and negroid races. The Hausa man says " na sha taba, 3 '- i.e., " I drink tobacco," just as he says " na sha rua, ?J i.e., " I drink water.'*

BERNARD PLATT.

Bath Club, Dover Street, W.

This was a common expression in the early days of " the weed n in England, See the verses beginning :

The Indian weed withered quite ; Green at noon, cut down at night ; Shows thy decay, all flesh is hay, Thus think, then drink tobacco.

They are given in ' The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1 p. 369 (Clarendon Press 1904). T. F. D.

Among some notes on smoking that lie before me I find references to drinking tobacco in Pennant's ' Wales, 1 vol. ii. p. 146, and Hazlitt's ' Faiths and Folk-lore,'- vol. i. p. 5. M. Y. A. H.

The expression " drinking tobacco " is found in many of our old authors ; but in Ben Jonson's ' Silent Woman, 1 IV. i., occurs the curious phrase " He lies on his back droning a tobacco-pipe.' 1 Chambers's ' Book of Days, 1 i. 168, says :

" In the rules of the school at Chigwell founded in 1629 it was declared that the master must

be a man of grave behaviour, and sober

and honest conversation, no tippler^ or haunter of ale-houses, and no puffer of tobacco.'

TOM JONES.

Scott refers to "drinking a whiff of smoke *' in ' The Legend of Montrose/ chap. xi. JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

Under the heading ' Fumer = Boire,' many instances of this way of speaking, from many languages and many countries, since the introduction of tobacco into the Old World, were collected in Melusine, vol. ix. cols 214, 229, 287, and vol. x. cols. 83 and 186 H. GAIDOZ.

Paris.

RICHARD GRAVES THE YOUNGER (10 S. xii. 408). I imagine the notion of Graves having left an autobiography is derived from an advertisement at the end of his last pub- lished volume, ' The Triflers, 1 which came out after his death in 1805. The advertisement states that a new edition of ' The Spiritual Quixote 1 is "speedily to be published.- and proceeds :

' To which will be added I HIS LIFE ;\ Partly written by himself, and completed by | Extracts from original Manuscripts | in the Possess

hi * J IS^Sfcfe is intended to form a part of a new and uniform Edition of all the Publications of the late Rev. Richard Graves.

It will be observed that the Life is state to be only partly written by himselt. inere is a considerable amount of autobiographical matter to be found in his works, which presume it was the intention of his executrix to incorporate with the "original manu- scripts in her possession into a connec

"But the new edition was never published, and the Life was never completed. Ine .un- finished MS., however, in the handwriting of Lucilla Graves, his daughter and execu- trix, is in my possession. There is alsc