[1] On the title-page is a picture of a bi-forked hill with a tall Virginian tobacco plant growing in the cleft. A scroll bears the motto, Digna Parnasso et Apolline. There is an excellent copy of the work in the long-room of the British Museum.
[2] In 1904 the maximum limit of moisture was fixed at 32 per cent. The moisture naturally present in the kinds now imported averages 14 per cent.
[3] Possibly hebenon is here employed for henbane, a name sometimes applied to tobacco by writers in Jacobean times. William Strachey, in his Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannica (1610), speaks of the tobacco-plant as ‘like to henbane.’ John Gerard in his description of the plant calls it ‘henbane of Peru.’ French writers of the same period had an unlimited vocabulary for tobacco, and among their names for it may be found ‘Peruvian henbane’ (jusquiame de Peru). If this view be admitted, then we have in ‘hebenon’ the only reference to tobacco the whole of Shakespeare’s works contain.
[4] Japan and her People. By Andrew Steinmetz, 1860.
[5] Adams died full of honours in 1620, and was buried on the summit of a little hill at the end of an inlet called Goldsborough.
[6] Stirpium Adversaria Nova. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, by Mathias de L’Obel, Botanist, London, 1571. Another edition was published at Antwerp in 1576.
[7] The Queen could not brook the least defection of a courtier from absolute devotion to herself.
[9] This work first appeared anonymously in 1604, and it is doubtful if an original copy is extant. Dr. Richard Garnett courteously informs the writer of these lines that there is not one in the British Museum. Professor Arber, however, has preserved a copy of it in his English Reprints. Arber says, ‘How early its royal authorship was avowed I know not, but it was generally known long before its insertion in the collected edition of the King’s works’ in (1616).
Since the above was written Mr. Thomas Arnold, of Hong-Kong, has informed the author that he possesses a copy—the only one extant—of the original edition, supplied to him by the late Mr. Bernard Quaritch, of Piccadilly.
[10] It is difficult to speak of James I. in measured terms. The reader is referred to Sir Anthony Weldon’s Court and Character of King James (Smeeton’s reprint, 1817). Raumer, ii. p. 200, says of James: ‘He was a slave to vices which could not fail to make him an object of disgust.’ Also, Winwood’s Memorials.
[11] Published at Antwerp, 1659, and translated by I.R. Dedicated to the Merchants and Planters of Tobacco.
