SNUFF-TAKERS DESCRIBED. 263 



Snuff-takers were not permitted to indulge their 

 favourite mode of taking tobacco, with an impunity dis- 

 allowed by the strict to their brethren the smokers. A 

 journalist thus quietly descants on the habit : Snuff- 

 taking is an odd custom. If we came suddenly upon it in 

 a foreign country, it would make us split our sides with 

 laughter. A grave gentleman takes a little casket out 

 of his pocket, puts a finger and thumb in, brings away 

 a pinch of a sort of powder, and then with the most 

 serious air possible, as if he were doing one of the 

 most important actions of his life (for even with the 

 most indifferent snuff-takers there is a certain look of 

 importance), proceeds to the thrust, and keeps thrust- 

 ing it at his nose ; after which he shakes his head, or 

 his waistcoat, or his nose itself, or all three, in 

 the style of a man who has done his duty, and satisfied 

 the most serious claim of his well being. It is curious 

 to see the various modes in which people take snuff; 

 some do it by little fits and starts, and get over the 

 thing quickly. These are epigrammatic snuff-takers, 

 who come to the point as fast as possible, and to whom 

 the pungency is everything. They generally use a 

 sharp and severe snuff, a sort of essence of pins' points. 

 Others are all urbanity and polished demeanour ; they 

 value the style as much as the sensation, and offer the 

 box around them as much out of dignity as benevo- 

 lence. Some take snuff irritably, others bashfully, 

 others in a manner as dry as snuff itself, generally with 

 an economy of the vegetable : others with a luxuriance 

 of gesture, and a lavishness of supply, that announce a 



