62 A LECTURE ON TOBACCO. 



exaggerated and unreal. I am glad if they feel it so, 

 should this prove that they are not yet in bondage. 



As with intoxicating liquors, only a minority of those 

 who use them exemplify their worst evils. Perhaps there 

 are other effects of which they may not be unconscious. 

 Ruskin says -} " It is not easy to estimate the demoral- 

 izing effect on the youth of Europe of the cigar, in en- 

 abling them to pass their time happily in idleness. To- 

 bacco is the worst natural curse of modern civilization." 

 Englishmen are not naturally Lazzaroni ; they like either 

 to do something, or to seem to do something. When 

 ladies spend their leisure hours together, they have their 

 fancy-work — or what they fancy is work. Men have not 

 this resource, and feel it awkward to sit and do nothing ; 

 unless they have some exciting theme they may not be 

 ready to talk ; when they smoke they feel at their ease, 

 for they are doing that which gives them no trouble. But 

 indolence, when it takes the guise of occupation, is 

 doubly ensnaring. No one, however, will accuse Carlyle 

 of indolence, and after his wife's death " he lauded tobac- 

 co" (to Mr. W. Maccall, a writer in " The Tobacco Plant*') 

 " as one of the divinest benefits that had ever come to 

 the human race, . . . when social, political, religious 

 anarchy, and every imaginable plague, made the earth un- 

 speakably miserable." But those of healthful mind do not 

 find " the earth unspeakably miserable," and in his soberer 

 mood he thus describes the influences of tobacco : " Gen- 

 erally bad ; pacificatory, but bad ; engaging you in idle 

 cloudy dreams ; still worse, . . . soothing all things 

 into lazy peace, that all things may be left to themselves 



1 " The Queen of the Air," p. 91. See "Monthly Letters," pp. 

 190* 235. 



