298 BREVITY AND SWEETNESS. 
the epicure nor the solace of the true tobacco-lover. Far be 
it from us to deny, or even to question, its value, its: utility, 
or its charm. We have smoked too many to dream of treat- 
ing them with scorn—cigarettes of Virginia shag, strong, 
pungent, luscious; of light and fragrant Persian, innocuous 
and soothing; cigarettes rolled by ladies’ dainty fingers, 
compressed by elegant French machines of silk and silver, 
cut, stamped, and gummed by prosy, matter-of-fact, and even 
vulgar Titanic engines in great tobaeco-factories. But the 
thorough-paced smoker renders to his cigarette only a sec- 
ondary and diluted adoration: it is nice, it is delicate, it is 
pretty—a thing to be toyed with, to be fondled, even to burn 
one’s fingers a perchance, one’s lips) withal; but by no 
means an object to call forth a passion. 
“ But just as the world would be a tame and an insipid 
institution were all men’s tastes alike, so the world of smok- 
ers would lose much of its romance were all the lovers of 
the weed of temperament too robust to love a cigarette. 
Brevity and sweetness are proverbially held to constitute 
claims upon the respect and admiration of the voluptuous, 
and to the cigarette these cannot be denied. There is some- 
thing touching in the self-abnegation of a tobaccoite who will 
devote five mortal minutes and the sweat of his refined intel- 
ligence, with the skill of his delicate fingers, to the prepara- 
tion of a tiny capsule of the weed, which burns itself to ashes 
in five minutes more. There is a butterfly-beauty about the 
cigarette to which the cigar and the pipe can lay no claim—a 
summer charm to stir the dreamy rapture of a poet, and to 
excite the Lotus-eating philosopher even to analogy. Just 
as the suns, and flowers, and balmy zephyrsof a century have 
gone to form the gauzy, multi-colored insect that flits across 
your path throughout a single summer’s day, and then returns 
to dust and vapor, so the harvest of West-Indian and East- 
Asian fields, the long voyage of the mariner, the merchant’s 
hours of soil, the steam-power and manual labor of the fac- 
tory, the thoughtful calculations of the trader, the skill of the 
tissue-paper maker, all have gone, and more than these, to 
the creation of a fairy-cylinder of Tobacco, which glows, 
delights, expires, and meets its end in ten or fifteen fleeting 
minutes.” 
Although the cigarette is not a favorite with us, still we 
admire its use as a sort of appendage to a good dinner, and 
as preparatory work for a “good smoke.” The Spaniards 
have always been great lovers of their minute rolls, and with 
