uring the
experience of three centuries, and apparently deepened by
their advancing civilization. Give us rules and
modifications, give us guides and correctives, give us
warnings against excess, precipitancy, and neglect of other
enjoyments, or of important duties, if you will. The urbane
aestheticism that regulates pleasure also limits it; and true
refinement ever modifies the indulgence it pervades. But it
is emulating Mrs. Partington and her mop to attempt to
preach down a world. When they do agree, their unanimity is
irresistible. Prohibition may give zest to enjoyment, and
provocation to curiosity, but can never overcome the
instincts of nature or cravings of nervous irritability, and
he who rises in rebellion against her absolute decree will
respect the limits and study the laws of a recognized and
regulated enjoyment.

"Let, then, the moralist point out what social duties may be
imperilled; let the physician apprise us of the disorders to
be guarded against; and let the lover of elegance see that
no neglect or slight awaits her. Of abstract arguments we
have seen the futility, of moral and medical crusades even
the most patient are weary, and we gladly turn to something
real, in the suffrages of a by-gone great man of
acknowledged fame--Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson loved the 'durne
weed,' and describes its every accident with the gusto of a
connoisseur. Hobbes smoked, after his early dinner, pipes
innumerable. Milton never went to bed without a pipe and a
glass of water, which I cannot help associating with his:

'Adam waked,
So custom'd, for his sleep was aery light, of pure digestion bred
And temperate vapors bland!'

"Sir Isaac Newton was smoking in his garden at Woolsthorpe
when the apple fell. Addison had a pipe in his mouth at all
hours, at 'Buttons.' Fielding both smoked and chewed. About
1740 it became unfashionable, and was banished from St.
James' to the country squires and parsons. Squire Western,
in _Tom Jones_, arriving in town, sends off Parson Supple to
Basingstoke, where he had left his Tobacco-box! The
snuff-box was substituted. Lord Mark Kerr, a brave officer
who affected the _petit maitre_ (_a la_ Pelham, in Lord
Lytton's second novel), invented the invisible