DRINKING AND SMOKING. | 291 
to open its pores; then draw it out, allowing but an t 
be held within the lips—believe me, you will enjoy it ae 
dred-fold more; and there are but few cigars that will not 
allow of their virtue being drawn though their leaves. Never 
bite the end off, and never use your cigar cruelly, by squeez- 
ing it, biting it, or re-lighting it. Cigar-holders, tubes, quills, 
and such like inventions, we despise. If you cannot bear the 
cigar in your mouth—aye, and enjoy it—you have no busi- 
ness with it: go back to your brown paper and cane! 
“What is the best beverage to imbibe whilst inhaling the 
precious weed? Momentous question! Coffee, or claret, 
says Jehu. I do not believe in bitter, as an accom- 
panying liquid to a cigar. The Corporation of Christ-church, 
years ago, smoked cigars, and drank with them that then 
famous concoction known as ‘Ringwood Beer.” What was 
the result? The first toast at every civic banquet held for 
years in that borough was gravely given out, and bumpered 
with due solemnity, as follows :— 
‘Prosperation to this Corporation.’ 
Brandy is a perfect antidote to inebriation from beer, so we 
are told. The Corporation should have known this, and 
been awakened from their long and pleasant dream of pros- 
peration. Brandy I should hardly reckon amongst the drinks 
ies are to be with cigars, notwithstanding that Tennyson 
. has asked :— 
‘For what delights can equal those 
Which stir, with spirits, inner depths? &c.’ 
Brandy-and-water, gin, whisky, and the likes are only fit for 
those who nocturnally lay the foundation for matutinal ‘hot 
coppers,’ with the vilest shag in the most odorous of yards 
of clay. ‘Smoking leads to drinking,’ has been a favorite 
old woman’s saying for time out of mind. How I hate old’ 
women’s sayings! A grain—requiring to be picked out with 
a pin and microscope—of truth, with a bushel of bunkum or 
cant. How is it, that ever since the days of James I, of 
‘hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain’ memory, there 
have always been carpers on the injurious effects ot smok- 
ing? ‘Nicotine! they say, with a would-be-taken-for-know- 
all-about-it-air. Quite so; but, as recent investigations have 
proved that, so far as the actual ‘ poisoning’ is concerned, it 
would take upwards of a thousand years to kill the most 
inveterate of healthy smokers, we have still time to breathe— 
and ‘it please the pigs’? em. for pipers—French tobacco 
