which cannot possibly do
her any good beyond the mere gratification of the palate.
And there is the luxury of carriage-keeping, in many
instances very detrimental to the health of women, by
entirely depriving them of the use of their legs. Now, you
cannot keep a carriage a-going quite as cheaply as a pipe.
Many a fine meerschaum keeps up its cheerful fire on a
shilling a-week. I am not advocating a sumptuary law to put
down carriages and cookery; I desire only to say that people
who indulge in these expensive and wholly superfluous
luxuries, have no right to be so hard on smokers for their
indulgence.

"Nearly every gentleman who drinks good wine at all will
drink the value of half-a-crown a-day. The ladies do not
blame him for this. Half-a-dozen glasses of good wine are
not thought an extravagance in any man of fair means, but
women exclaim when a man spends the same amount in smoking
cigars. The French habit of coffee-drinking and the English
habit of tea-drinking are also cases in point. They are
quite as expensive as ordinary Tobacco-smoking, and, like
it, defensible only on the ground of the pleasurable
sensation they communicate to the nervous system. But these
habits are so universal that no one thinks of attacking
them, unless now and then some persecuted smoker in
self-defence.

"Tea and tobacco are alike seductive, delicious, and
deleterious. The two indulgences will, perhaps, become
equally necessary to the English world. It is high treason
to the English national feeling to say a word against tea,
which is now so universally recognized as a national
beverage that people forget it comes from China, and that it
is both alien and heathen. Still, I mean no offence when I
put tea in the same category with Tobacco. Now, who thinks
of lecturing us on the costliness of tea? And yet it is a
mere superfluity. The habit of taking it as we do is unknown
across the Channel, and was quite unknown amongst ourselves
a very little time ago, when English people were no less
proud of themselves and their customs than they are now, and
perhaps with equally good reason. A friend of mine tells me
that he smokes every day, at a cost of about sixpence
a-week. Now, I would like to know in what other way so much
enjoyment is t