It’s a bit rich, frankly, for the man who set us on the downward spiral of smoking fags to lecture us on the parallel peril of binge drinking.

Sir Walter Raleigh, whose introduction of tobacco to England has killed millions in the intervening four centuries, keenly promoted the habit of drinking smoke, or quaffing the fume, as Georgian dandies called it. But old Walt – pirate, explorer, potato pioneer and poet – was a bit of a temperance bore on the subject of alcohol.

In a rare first edition found in a private library and to be auctioned at Bonhams next month, Sir Walter counselled his readers that excessive drinking was a bewitching and infectious vice which destroyed health, promoted premature ageing and “transformeth a man into a beast”.

In his essay entitled “Instructions to his son, and to posterity”, Sir Walter never mentioned lung cancer, emphysema and the other deadly diseases associated with smoking, but they didn’t know about these things in Tudor times. What they did know about was booze.

“Take especial care that thou delight not in wine,” he instructs. “For there never was any man that came to honour or preferment that loved it. For it transformeth a man into a beast, decayeth health, poisoneth the breath, destroyeth natural heat, brings a man’s stomach to an artificial heat, deformeth the face and rotteth the teeth.”

Any other vice is better than the demon drink, Sir Walter says, because there is hope of redemption. “But a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness, for the longer it possesseth a man the more he will delight in it, and the elder he groweth the more he shall be subject to it.”

The book was written by Raleigh and others in the early years of the 17th Century but not published until well into the 18th. It is one of a number of improving and cautionary educational works being put up for sale by John and Monica Lawson, private book collectors who assembled a substantial collection of finger-wag-ging works that are expected to fetch £250,000 at auction on April 2.

In another volume, published in 1665 when England was enjoying Charles II’s restoration, an anonymous author gives early warning against another present-day scourge – obesity. “Set a knife to thy appetite, and make not thy belly thy god. Be not delicate in thy diet; let thy stomach be thy sauce. Mind more what is wholesome than what is toothsome. It is poor pleasure to please the palate.”

Francis Osborne, in a book of advice to his son published in 1659, listed a host of dangers including marriage, women in general, large libraries, the monarchy and – naturally – obesity. “To eat as long as you are able especially in England, where meat aptest to inveagle the stomach to an overrepletion, comes last. Let no persuasion tempt you to a second repast till by a fierce hunger you find yourself quite discharged of the former excess.”

Jacques du Bosc, in a volume of 1692, advises his readers to steer clear of lewd and debauched women, whom he defines as those who will not acknowledge their ageing faces. “They do not consider that the wrinkles make a reckoning of the years upon their faces, as the figures do of the hours upon a dial.” No Laboratoires Garnier in those days, then.

Damnation of Walter Raleigh and his evil weed is nowhere to be seen in the collection. It had to come from the King who succeeded his patron on the English throne. Before he had even commissioned a new translation of the Bible, King James I wrote his Counterblaste to Tobacco, in which he described the smoking habit as “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless". And that was nearly four centuries before Sir Richard Doll established the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer.

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