Not much better is the excuse alleged in the social and genial influences of tobacco.  It certainly seems a singular way of opening the lips for conversation by closing them on a pipe-stem, and it would rather appear as if Fate designed to gag the smokers and let the non-smokers talk.  But supposing it otherwise, does it not mark a condition of extreme juvenility in our social development, if no resources of intellect can enable a half-dozen intelligent men to be agreeable to each other, without applying the forcing process, by turning the room into an imperfectly organized chimney?  Brilliant women can be brilliant without either wine or tobacco, and Napoleon always maintained that without an admixture of feminine wit conversation grew tame.  Are all male beings so much stupider by nature than the other sex, that men require stimulants and narcotics to make them mutually endurable?

And as the conversational superiorities of woman disprove the supposed social inspirations of tobacco, so do her more refined perceptions yet more emphatically pronounce its doom.  Though belles of the less mature description, eulogistic of sophomores, may stoutly profess that they dote on the Virginian perfume, yet cultivated womanhood barely tolerates the choicest tobacco-smoke, even in its freshness, and utterly recoils from the stale suggestions of yesterday.  By whatever enthusiasm misled, she finds something abhorrent in the very nature of the thing.  In vain did loyal Frenchmen baptize the weed as the queen’s own favorite, Herba Catherinae Medicae; it is easier to admit that Catherine de’ Medici was not feminine than that tobacco is.  Man also recognizes the antagonism; there is scarcely a husband in America who would not be converted from smoking, if his wife resolutely demanded her right of moiety in the cigar-box.  No Lady Mary, no loveliest Marquise, could make snuff-taking beauty otherwise than repugnant to this generation.  Rustic females who habitually chew even pitch or spruce-gum are rendered thereby so repulsive that the fancy refuses to pursue the horror farther and imagine it tobacco; and all the charms of the veil and the fan can scarcely reconcile the most fumacious American to the cigarrito of the Spanish fair.  How strange seems Parton’s picture of General Jackson puffing his long clay pipe on one side of the fireplace and Mrs. Jackson puffing hers on the other!  No doubt, to the heart of the chivalrous backwoodsman those smoke-dried lips were yet the altar of early passion,—­as that rather ungrammatical tongue was still the music of the spheres; but the unattractiveness of that conjugal counterblast is Nature’s own protest against smoking.