The use of tobacco must, therefore, be held to mark a rather coarse and childish epoch in our civilization, if nothing worse.  Its most ardent admirer hardly paints it into his picture of the Golden Age.  It is difficult to associate it with one’s fancies of the noblest manhood, and Miss Muloch reasonably defies the human imagination to portray Shakspeare or Dante with pipe in mouth.  Goethe detested it; so did Napoleon, save in the form of snuff, which he apparently used on Talleyrand’s principle, that diplomacy was impossible without it.  Bacon said, “Tobacco-smoking is a secret delight serving only to steal away men’s brains.”  Newton abstained from it:  the contrary is often claimed, but thus says his biographer, Brewster,—­saying that “he would make no necessities to himself.”  Franklin says he never used it, and never met with one of its votaries who advised him to follow the example.  John Quincy Adams used it in early youth, and after thirty years of abstinence said, that, if every one would try abstinence for three months, it would annihilate the practice, and add five years to the average length of human life.

In attempting to go beyond these general charges of waste and foolishness, and to examine the physiological results of the use of tobacco, one is met by the contradictions and perplexities which haunt all such inquiries.  Doctors, of course, disagree, and the special cases cited triumphantly by either side are ruled out as exceptional by the other.  It is like the question of the precise degree of injury done by alcoholic drinks.  To-day’s newspaper writes the eulogy of A.B., who recently died at the age of ninety-nine, without ever tasting ardent spirits; to-morrow’s will add the epitaph of C.D., aged one hundred, who has imbibed a quart of rum a day since reaching the age of indiscretion; and yet, after all, both editors have to admit that the drinking usages of society are growing decidedly more decent.  It is the same with the tobacco argument.  Individual cases prove nothing either way; there is such a range of vital vigor in different individuals, that one may withstand a life of error, and another perish in spite of prudence.  The question is of the general tendency.  It is not enough to know that Dr. Parr smoked twenty pipes in an evening, and lived to be seventy-eight; that Thomas Hobbes smoked thirteen, and survived to ninety-two; that Brissiac of Trieste died at one hundred and sixteen, with a pipe in his mouth; and that Henry Hartz of Schleswig used tobacco steadily from the age of sixteen to one hundred and forty-two; nor would any accumulation of such healthy old sinners prove anything satisfactory.  It seems rather overwhelming, to be sure, when Mr. Fairholt assures us that his respected father “died at the age of seventy-two:  he had been twelve hours a day in a tobacco-manufactory for nearly fifty years; and he both smoked and chewed while busy in the labors of the workshop, sometimes in a dense cloud