what is beauty?" (rather good that, from Jack),
"and besides—all women are humbugs."

So Jack goes off (and I cannot but feel
heartily glad at Jack's departure). Absence
will be very good for Jack, I know. Whereas, for
me!—How happy I am as I resume the thread
of my honeymoon, and feel that there is none
now but I myself to admire (I conveniently
ignore Dick) the sweet face of my pretty wife!

HAVANA CIGARS.

A PUBLIC writer, I apprehend, has a clear
right to express contempt for his own productions.
Few will believe him, it is true; for the
reason that in humanity—for humanity's
everlasting good—there is a deep-rooted conviction
that no creature, not being a monster, can
absolutely hate his own offspring. As for
contempt, we know very well that it is only Hatred
in a white necktie: Hatred that goes out to
dinner in good society, and voids venom over
cut glass and company claret. But we are
capable of doing many things, which, through
fear of ridicule, or shame, or punishment, we
refrain from doing; and, being anonymous and
consequently reckless, I claim my right to
hold in utter scorn and disdain a paper I
lately wrote in this esteemed journal, and which
purported to describe the Cigarito Factory of
La Honvadez, at Havana.* Understand, that
it is the matter, and not the manner, of the paper
in question which I so completely contemn. If
the critics say anything about my style, or my
semicolons, I will show fight. 'Tis the theme
I despise. Cigaritos! Pah! I puff the papelito
away. The trivial topic; the twopenny text!
Removed by an intellectual universe from Isaac
Newton—although that sage, too, was a great
smoker, and, in a fit of mental abstraction,
once made use of a lady's little finger as a
pipe-stopper—I yet feel that I have been lingering
on the shore, picking up pretty little shells and
molluscs, while the great Ocean of tobacco-
smoke lay, all undiscovered, before me. I must
really trouble that cranky invalid Muse of mine
to "oblige the company" once more, and to
Awake, Arise, or be for ever Fallen in that
sound sleep into which she subsided, with one
of La Honvadez cigaritos between her taper
thumb and finger, at the conclusion of my first
paper of tobacco.

*See page 272 of the last volume.

She wakes. She is all alive. I have got my
Muse fast at Florian's, on St. Mark's Place,
Venice, and on a sumptuous summer night.
The great full moon hangs over our heads,
imminent, like the sign of the World Turned
Upside Down. I have regaled my Muse with iced
coffee and macaroons. She has even partaken
of a bicchierino of maraschino. A "bicchierino"
—isn't it a dainty name for a dram? Then,
rubbing my hands in uncharitable glee, to think
that yonder white-jerkined Tedisco officers have
nothing choicer to smoke than three-halfpenny
"Virginias "—the actual Virginia of their birth
being, probably, the Terra di Lavoco, or the
Island of Sardinia—I produce from that private
case, which has hitherto eluded the lynx eyes of
the German Zollverein, the Spanish Duana, and
the Italian Dogana, a real cigar—a Regalia
Britannica, "Plor fina, Maduro: Havana, 1864."
My Muse lights up at once, and pours forth
memory in clouds. You need not be in the least
shocked at the idea of this young lady from
Parnassus, otherwise a most decorous person,
graduate of the Hyde Park College, and who
has been nursery-governess in a nobleman's
family, indulging in a cigar as big as a B.B.
pencil, at ten o'clock at night, in front of a public
coffee-house. Between ourselves be it
mentioned, there are many ladies in Venice who are,
to the full, as inveterate smokers as the ladies of
Seville. My Muse, perhaps, is the only highborn
dame who puffs in the open Piazza; but
then, she is invisible to the vulgar, and an
Immortal. You shall scarcely, however, take an
evening airing in your gondola without observing
numerous fair and graceful forms at their
open windows, or in their balconies, enjoying,
not the pretty puerility of the papelito, but the
downright and athletic exercitation of the full-
grown cigar. About sundown, on most evenings,
our barcoroli row us from the Ponte di
Fusori to the Giardini Pubblici. We strike the
Grand Canal a little below the garden of the
Palazzo Reale. At the left-hand corner of
the canal from which we emerge there is a
pretty little mansion, Venetian Gothic in style,
and, for Venice, in excellent repair. It is
precisely the little mansion which, if its bodily
eradication, shipment to Liverpool, and removal to
London, on the American system of rollers, was
judged impossible, I should like to cause Mr.
Barry, R.A., to build for me in Curzon-street,
Mayfair; and then, with the title-deeds of the
freehold in my strong-box, and the bins of my
bijou house well ballasted with curious hocks
and peculiar clarets, I would lead a chirping life,
entertaining my friends, drinking even mine
enemy's health, and wishing him better luck the
next time he went out stabbing. At a charming
ogival window of this tiny palazetto there is sure
to be, about this sunset, hour, a plump, jovial-
looking little lady—very like the portraits of the
Countess Guiccioli—and who is pulling at a
cigar at least half an inch longer and stouter
than my Regalia Britannica. I think the plump
little lady smokes ambasciadores—a kind of
cigar which you hesitate about smoking habitually
unless your income exceeds fifteen thousand
a year. In about an hour after sunset we glide
back from the Giardini towards the Rialto, and
there, at the same ogival window, we are sure
to find the same plump little lady pulling away
as vigorously as ever at her weed. It is not, I
am afraid, the same cigar. Even in an
ambasciadore there is not more than forty-five minutes'
steady and continuous smoking. It has grown
dark by this time, and through the open casement
I can see a delicious little salone with a
frescoed ceiling, containing that "copiosa