use and pique themselves on their snuff-boxes, without the slightest suspicion that there is any thing in them to which courtship and elegance can object; and we suppose this is the case still, where the snuff-taker, though young in age, is old in habit. Yet we should doubt, were we in his place. He cannot be certain how many women may have refused his addresses on that single account; nor, if he marries, to what secret sources of objection it may give rise. To be clean is one of the first duties at all times; to be the reverse, or to risk it, in the least avoidable respect, is perilous in the eyes of that passion, which, of all others, is at once the most lavish and the most nice, which makes the greatest allowance for all that belongs to it, and the least for whatever is cold or foreign, or implies a coarse security. A very loving nature, however, may have some one unlovely habit, which a wise party on either side may correct, if it have any address. The only passage which we remember meeting with in a book, in which this license assumed by the male sex is touched upon, is in a pleasant comedy translated from the French some years ago, and brought upon the stage in London, the "Green Man." Mr. Jones, we believe, was the translator. He also enacted the part of the lover; and very pleasantly he did it. It was one of his best performances. Luckily for our present purpose, he had a very sweet assistant in the person of Miss Blanchard, a young actress of that day, who, after charming the town with the sprightly delicacy of her style, and with a face better than handsome, prematurely quitted it, to their great regret, though, we believe, for the best of all

reasons. In the course of her lover's addresses, this lady had to find fault with his habit of snuff-taking; and she did it with a face full of such loving and flattering reasons, and in a voice also so truly accordant with the words which the author had put into her mouth, that we remember thinking how natural it was for the gentleman to give up the point as he did, instantly, and to pitch the cause of offence away from him, with the exclamation, "Ma tabatière, adieu!" ("Farewell, snuff-box!") Thus the French, who were the greatest sinners in this matter, appear, as they ought, to have been the first reformers of it, and openly to have protested against the union of love and snuff-taking in either sex.

We merely give this as a hint to certain snuff-takers at a particular time of life. We are loath to interfere with others, till we can find a substitute for the excitement and occupation which the snuff-box affords; fearing that we should steal from some their very powers of reflection; from some their good temper or patience or only consolation; from others their helps to wit and good fellowship. Whenever Gibbon was going to say a good thing, it was observed that he announced it by a complacent tap on his snuff-box. Life might have been a gloomier thing, even than it was, to Dr. Johnson, if he had not enlivened his views of it with the occasional stimulus of a pinch. Napoleon, in his flight from Moscow, was observed one day, after pulling a log on to a fire, impatiently seeking for his last chance of a consoling thought; and he found it in the corner of his snuff-box. It was his last pinch; and most imperatively he pinched it! digging

it, and fetching it out from its intrenchment. Besides, we have a regard for snuff-shops and their proprietors; and never pass Pontet's or Killpack's or Turner's without wishing well to the companionable people that frequent them, and thinking of the most agreeable periods of English and French wit. You might almost as soon divorce the idea of the Popes, Steeles, and Voltaires, from their wigs and caps, as from their snuff-boxes. Lady Mary Wortley took snuff; Madame du Bocage also, no doubt; we fear even the charming Countess of Suffolk, and my Lady Harvey. Steele, in the character of Bickerstaff, speaking of his half-sister, Miss Jenny Distaff, who was a blue-stocking and about to be married, thinks it desirable that she should not continue to have a nose " all over snuff” in future. He seems, in consideration of her books, willing to compromise with a reasonable beginning. Ladies are greatly improved in this respect. No blue-stockings now-a-days, we suspect, take snuff, that have any pretensions to youth or beauty. They rather choose to realize the visions of their books, and vindicate the united claims of mind and person. Sure of their pretensions, they even disclaim any pretence, except that of wearing stockings like other people; to prove which, like proper unaffected women, they give into the fashion of short petticoats, philosophically risking the chance of drawing inferior eyes from the charms of their talk to those of their feet and ankles.

In the battle of the "Rape of the Lock," Pope makes his heroine, Belinda, conquer one of her gallant enemies by chucking a pinch of snuff in his face; nor

does he tell us that she borrowed it. Are we to conclude that even she, the pattern of youthful beauty, took it out of her own pocket?

"But this bold lord, with manly strength endued,

She with one finger and a thumb subdued;
Just where the breath of life his nostrils drew,

A charge of snuff the wily virgin threw ;
The Gnomes direct, to every atom just,
The pungent grains of titillating dust;"

[A capital line!]

"Sudden with starting tears each eye o'erflows,
And the high dome re-echoes to his nose."

This mode of warfare is now confined to the shoplifters. No modern poet would think of making his heroine throw snuff at a man.

An Italian wit has written a poem on Tobacco (La Tabaccheide), in which, with the daring animal spirits of his countrymen, he has ventured upon describing a We shall be bolder than he, considering the less enthusiastic noses of the North, and venture to give a free version of the passage:

sneeze.

"Ma mi sento tutto mordere

E dentro e fuori

Il meato degli odori,

E la piramide
Rinocerontica;
E via più crescere
Quella prurigine,
Che non mai sazia,
Va stuzzicandomi,
Va rimordendomi,
E inuggiolendomi,
E va gridandomi

There is more of it; but we cannot stand sneezing all night. (We write this towards bedtime).

"What a moment! What a doubt!·

All my nose, inside and out,

All my thrilling, tickling, caustic

Pyramid rhinocerostic,

Wants to sneeze, and cannot do it!

Now it yearns me, thrills me, stings me;
Now with rapturous torment wrings me;

Now says, 'Sneeze, you fool! get through it.'
What shall help me - Oh, good Heaven!

Sneezing, however, is not a high snuff-taking evidence. It shows the author to have been raw to the science, and to have written more like a poet than a professor.

As snuff-taking is a practice inclining to reflection, and therefore, to a philosophical consideration of the various events of this life, grave as well as gay, we shall conclude the present article with the only tragical story we ever met with in connection with a snuff