successful pieces, combine to deprive thousands
of play-goers of any theatrical entertainment
for weeks and months in succession. Free
trade means a wider field of competition, and, in
the case of the drama, competition means, not
necessarily lower prices, but a higher article.

ALL IN THE CLOUDS.

I SEEK a goddess in the clouds. The
goddess I seek, is Hope; but there is a perpetual
cloud upon her fair forehead. That cloud, in
fact, is all I ever see of my deity. I am so far
like Ixion, that I seek a divinity, and I only find
a cloud.

Not to be euphuistic, in plain words, I am
blowing a cloud, and the cloud I blow is blown
from a cigar, a real fragrant Havannah (an
"Intimidada," to use the sonorous Spanish of
the modern tobacconist). Of all the regions of
cloudland, the region I prefer is the untrodden
suburb, the last exhalation just risen, on which
no castles in the air, no "chateaux in Spain,"
have yet been built by dreamers.

It used to be believed, some twenty years
ago, that cigars were introduced into
England during the Peninsular war. It was
supposed that they came into use, with us, about
the time when guitar-playing became fashionable,
contemporaneously with those long blue
cloaks for which the Duke of Wellington became
remarkable, and by which old writing-masters
at, say, Turnham-green academies are now chiefly
distinguished. Before the date of that
successful war, the young antiquary could find
no traces of anything but an age of white
churchwarden pipes and secret smoking. The
clay pipe was a common homely thing, and
under the ban of good society. Here and there
a rough country gentleman might perhaps sink
to the level of the churchwarden, but as for open
smoking in the streets or public places, it was
simply unknown, it was thought, until the cigar
came from Spain, and the meerschaum pipe
from Germany.

Now, the truth is, cigars are as old as
pipes—perhaps older. To roll up a leaf and
smoke it, was an easier thing to invent than
to chop up a leaf, place it in a bowl, and smoke it
through a tube. Fifty years after Columbus
landed at San Salvador, a certain Girolamo
Benzoni, who wrote a History of the New
World, mentions the herb, called in the Mexican
language "tabacco," and describes the smoking
of cigars with all the disgust of a Solomon James
the First. When the leaves were in season, says
the offended Milanese, they picked them, tied
them in bundles, and dried them near the fire.
They then took maize-leaves, rolled them full
of tobacco, and lighted them at one end, putting
the other in their mouths. They drew the
smoke up into their throats and heads, finding
a pleasure in retaining the smoke until they
lost their reason. Some would take so much of
it that they would fall down as if dead, remaining
many hours insensible. Wiser men only
inhaled enough of this smoke to make themselves
giddy. "See," says Benzoni, "what a
pestiferous and wicked poison from the devil this
must be!"

Yet here I am, some centuries later, sitting
on my lawn at Chalkerton under a beech-tree,
whose clear bark is mottled with sunshine, and
whose half transparent leaves are like
fragmentary Venetian blinds between me and the
shafts of Phœbus. Girolamo Benzoni has
preached his unheeded sermon, but he sleeps his
sleep, and the world smokes on. Millions of
cigars are at this moment being lighted as
morning incense to the blessed Genius of
Summer Idleness, and I, too, burn my little
fragrant torch in his honour.

Did smoking come into Europe by way of
Spain, or had the Indian weed struck an earlier
root in the sleepy East, where fever and lethargy
alternately torment mankind? Many learned
men have argued that there is in humanity an
innate craving to smoke, and that even before
tobacco came from America, Europeans smoked
herbs. There is a floating tradition that
somewhere in Ireland (Cashel or Kilkenny, I think)
there is a tomb, and that on that tomb there is
the recumbent statue of an early Irish king, and
that in the lace that binds the helmet of that king
there is stuck a small pipe, exactly resembling
the little low-bred dudheen that an Irishman
usually wears stuck in his limp rusty hat-brim.
If this be so, then European smoking did not
begin with the arrival of tobacco; and tobacco
merely superseded all other herbs, conquering
and driving them from the field by its superior
flavour, aroma, and potency.

As a great man, to develop his greatness,
requires not only genius but an age suitable
to develop his capacities, and contemporaries
wanting what he has to give them, so an
invention, when it appears, must meet with a
congenial age. If it meet with a century
indifferent or opposed to it, it perishes, passes
again into oblivion, or lies dormant until the
fitting season arrive. Tobacco arrived just as
it was wanted (at this crisis I bite off the tip
of my third "Intimidada" as dexterously as a
bullfinch nips off a hawthorn bud). The European
had lost the untiring vigour of the savage,
and had become a ruminator; he needed a
frequent inducement to thoughtful idleness, and he
found it in tobacco. He had grown dyspeptic,
and he found a friend to digestion. He was
looking out for a nervous sedative, as the
Reformation was racking men's brains with
theological questions, and nature brought him
tobacco.

A young antiquary of the present day has
lately been wondering, in that well-known and
excellent antiquarian paper, Notes and Queries,
about Shakespeare's systematic silence on the
subject of smoking. (At this point a sudden
difficulty in my "Intimidada" compels me to
use my knife, after the manner of a lancet,
wounding to heal.) Now, this is certain. Jean
Nicot introduced tobacco into France from
Portugal, whither he went as ambassador, about