The Fitz-Boodle Papers | Page 5

Sir John, "and kept
us laughing until past midnight." Her ladyship instantly sets me down
as a person to be avoided. "George," whispers she to her boy, "promise
me on your honor, when you go to town, not to know that man." And
when she enters the breakfast-room for prayers, the first greeting is a
peculiar expression of countenance, and inhaling of breath, by which
my lady indicates the presence of some exceedingly disagreeable odor
in the room. She makes you the faintest of curtsies, and regards you, if
not with a "flashing eye," as in the novels, at least with a "distended
nostril." During the whole of the service, her heart is filled with the
blackest gall towards you; and she is thinking about the best means of
getting you out of the house.
What is this smoking that it should be considered a crime? I believe in
my heart that women are jealous of it, as of a rival. They speak of it as
of some secret, awful vice that seizes upon a man, and makes him a
pariah from genteel society. I would lay a guinea that many a lady who
has just been kind enough to rend the above lines lays down the book,
after this confession of mine that I am a smoker, and says, "Oh, the
vulgar wretch!" and passes on to something else.
The fact is, that the cigar IS a rival to the ladies, and their conqueror too.
In the chief pipe-smoking nations they are kept in subjection. While the
chief, Little White Belt, smokes, the women are silent in his wigwam;

while Mahomet Ben Jawbrahim causes volumes of odorous incense of
Latakia to play round his beard, the women of the harem do not disturb
his meditations, but only add to the delight of them by tinkling on a
dulcimer and dancing before him. When Professor Strumpff of
Gottingen takes down No. 13 from the wall, with a picture of Beatrice
Cenci upon it, and which holds a pound of canaster, the Frau
Professorin knows that for two hours Hermann is engaged, and takes up
her stockings and knits in quiet. The constitution of French society has
been quite changed within the last twelve years: an ancient and
respectable dynasty has been overthrown; an aristocracy which
Napoleon could never master has disappeared: and from what cause? I
do not hesitate to say,--FROM THE HABIT OF SMOKING. Ask any
man whether, five years before the revolution of July, if you wanted a
cigar at Paris, they did not bring you a roll of tobacco with a straw in it!
Now, the whole city smokes; society is changed; and be sure 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