in the
cigar-box. No Lady Mary, no loveliest Marquise, could make snuff-taking
beauty otherwise than repugnant to this generation. Rustic females
who habitually chew even pitch or spruce-gum are rendered thereby so
repulsive that the fancy refuses to pursue the horror farther and
imagine it tobacco; and all the charms of the veil and the fan can
scarcely reconcile the most fumacious American to the _cigarrito_ of
the Spanish fair. How strange seems Parton's picture of General Jackson
puffing his long clay pipe on one side of the fireplace and Mrs. Jackson
puffing hers on the other! No doubt, to the heart of the chivalrous
backwoodsman those smoke-dried lips were yet the altar of early
passion,--as that rather ungrammatical tongue was still the music of
the spheres; but the unattractiveness of that conjugal counterblast is
Nature's own protest against smoking.

The use of tobacco must, therefore, be held to mark a rather coarse and
childish epoch in our civilization, if nothing worse. Its most ardent
admirer hardly paints it into his picture of the Golden Age. It is
difficult to associate it with one's fancies of the noblest manhood,
and Miss Muloch reasonably defies the human imagination to portray
Shakspeare or Dante with pipe in mouth. Goethe detested it; so did
Napoleon, save in the form of snuff, which he apparently used on
Talleyrand's principle, that diplomacy was impossible without it. Bacon
said, "Tobacco-smoking is a secret delight serving only to steal away
men's brains." Newton abstained from it: the contrary is often claimed,
but thus says his biographer, Brewster,--saying that "he would make no
necessities to himself." Franklin says he never used it, and never met
with one of its votaries who advised him to follow the example.
John Quincy Adams used it in early youth, and after thirty years of
abstinence said, that, if every one would try abstinence for three
months, it would annihilate the practice, and add five years to the
average length of human life.

In attempting to go beyond these general charges of waste and
foolishness, and to examine the physiological results of the use of
tobacco, one is met by the contradictions and perplexities which haunt
all such inquiries. Doctors, of course, disagree, and the special cases
cited triumphantly by either side are ruled out as exceptional by the
other. It is like the question of the precise degree of injury done by
alcoholic drinks. To-day's newspaper writes