CELEBRATED SNUFF-TAKERS. 273 



When pensively we sit or walk, 



Each social friend away, 

 Snuff best supplies the want of talk, 



And cheers the lonely day. 



The hand, like alabaster fair, 



The diamond's sparkling pride, 

 Can ne'er so gracefully appear, 



If snuff should be denied. 



E'en Commerce, name of sweetest sound 



To ev'ry British, ear, 

 Must suff'ring droop, should snuff be found 



Unworthy of our care. 



For ev'ry pinch of snuff we take 



Helps trade in some degree ; 

 As smallest drops of water make 

 The vast unbounded sea. 



Among men of large intellect, snuff- taking has been 

 rather common ; it may have been felt by them as a 

 counter-irritant to the over-worked brain. Pope and 

 Swift were snuff-takers ; the latter made his by mixing 

 pounded tobacco with ready- manufactured Spanish 

 snuff. Bolingbroke, Congreve, and Addison indulged 

 in it. Gibbon was a confirmed snuff-taker, and in one 

 of his letters he has left this account of his mode of 

 using it : "I drew my snuff-box, rapp'd it, took snuff 

 twice, and continued my discourse, in my usual atti- 

 tude of my body bent forwards, and my fore-finger 

 stretched out." In the silhouette prefixed to his 

 miscellaneous works, he is represented indulging his 

 habit, and looking, as Column expresses it, — 



" Like an erect, black tadpole, taking snuff." 



Frederick the Great loved it so entirely that he had 



