a Scottish writer on miscellaneous subjects. He was educated for the pursuit of medicine, but is best known by a pamphlet, printed in Edinburgh in 1614, and entitled Nepenthes, or the Vertues of Tobacco. Barclay studied at Louvain under the learned Justus Lipsius, to whom he afterwards addressed several letters which have been printed. Two years after the appearance of Barclay's work, King James published his famous A Counterblaste to Tobacco, in which he denounced smoking as a "custome loathsome to the eye."
