ure of this, ladies,
a similar combat is going on in this country at present between
cigar-smoking and you. Do you suppose you will conquer? Look over the
wide world, and see that your adversary has overcome it. Germany has
been puffing for threescore years; France smokes to a man. Do you think
you can keep the enemy out of England? Psha! look at his progress. Ask
the clubhouses, Have they smoking-rooms or not? Are they not obliged to
yield to the general want of the age, in spite of the resistance of the
old women on the committees? I, for my part, do not despair to see a
bishop lolling out of the "Athenaeum" with a cheroot in his mouth, or,
at any rate, a pipe stuck in his shovel-hat.

But as in all great causes and in promulgating new and illustrious
theories, their first propounders and exponents are generally the
victims of their enthusiasm, of course the first preachers of smoking
have been martyrs, too; and George Fitz-Boodle is one. The first gas-man
was ruined; the inventor of steam-engine printing became a pauper. I
began to smoke in days when the task was one of some danger, and paid
the penalty of my crime. I was flogged most fiercely for my first cigar;
for, being asked to dine one Sunday evening with a half-pay colonel of
dragoons (the gallant, simple, humorous Shortcut--heaven bless him!--I
have had many a guinea from him who had so few), he insisted upon my
smoking in his room at the "Salopian," and the consequence was, that I
became so violently ill as to be reported intoxicated upon my return
to Slaughter-House School, where I was a boarder, and I was whipped the
next morning for my peccadillo. At Christ Church, one of our tutors was
the celebrated lamented Otto Rose, who would have been a bishop under
the present Government, had not an immoderate indulgence in water-gruel
cut short his elegant and useful career. He was a good man, a pretty
scholar and poet (the episode upon the discovery of eau-de-Cologne,
in his prize-poem on "The Rhine," was considered a masterpiece of art,
though I am not much of a judge myself upon such matters), and he was as
remarkable for his fondness for a tuft as for his nervous antipathy to
tobacco. As ill-luck would have it, my rooms (in Tom Quad) were exactly
under his; and I was grown by this time to be a confirmed smoker. I was
a baronet's son (we are of James the First's creation), and I do believe
our tutor could have pardoned any crime in the world but this. He had
se