[Sidenote: LIGHTING CIGARS.] Many tobacchose epicures, who smoke their regular dozen or two, place the evil sufficient for the day between fresh lettuce-leaves; this damps the outer leaf of the article, and improves the narcotic effect; _mem._, the inside, the trail, _las tripas_, as the Spaniards call it, should be kept quite dry. The disordered interior of the royal cigars is masked by a good outside wrapper leaf, just as Spanish rags are cloaked by a decent _capa_, but l’habit ne fait pas le cigarre. Few except the rich can afford to smoke good cigars. Ferdinand VII., unlike his ancestor Louis XIV., “qui,” says La Beaumelle, “haïssoit le tabac singulièrement, quoiqu’un de ses meilleurs revenus,” was not only a grand compounder but consumer thereof. He indulged in the royal extravagance of a very large thick cigar made in the Havañah expressly for his gracious use, as he was too good a judge to smoke his own manufacture. Even of these he seldom smoked more than the half; the remainder was a grand perquisite, like our palace lights. The cigar was one of his pledges of love and hatred: he would give one to his favourites when in sweet temper; and often, when meditating a treacherous _coup_, would dismiss the unconscious victim with a royal _puro_: and when the happy individual got home to smoke it, he was saluted by an Alguacil with an order to quit Madrid in twenty-four hours. The “innocent” Isabel, who does not smoke, substitutes sugar-plums; she regaled Olozaga with a sweet present, when she was “doing him” at the bidding of the Christinist camarilla. It would seem that the Spanish Bourbons, when not “cretinised” into idiots, are creatures composed of cunning and cowardice. But “those who cannot dissimulate are unfit to reign” was the axiom of their illustrious ancestor Louis XI. [Sidenote: LIGHTING CIGARS.]