What characteristics, then, did my triad of blowers possess in common, and from what community of idiosyncrasy did they agree in a practice unknown to the generality of mankind? The latter question I avow my inability to answer: on the former I can perhaps throw a little twilight. The principal man among them in point of rank--a late noble and facetious judge--was by far the most inveterate blower in the class: his puff was perpetual, like the mahogany dye of his boot-tops. One point of resemblance I have traced between the peer and his two compeers: he was a _proud_ man. In proof of this allegation I have the evidence of his own avowal:--“I’m the first peer of my family, but I’m as proud as the old nobility of England.” Of the other pair, one I know to be proud, the other I believe to be so. Here then is one element--PRIDE: another I conceive to be WEALTH. My first-class blowers were all rich men: nay, the youngest among them never ventured on blowing, to the best of my belief, till he had gotten a good slice of a quarter of a million whereof his uncle died possessed. I was standing one day at the door of a bookseller’s shop in Suffolk Street, deeply intent upon nothing, when my gentleman passed by on the opposite side. My eyes, ready for any new object, idly followed him, and as he crossed to Nassau Street he blew. The offer was fair enough for a beginner, but it would not do--he wanted _fat_. No man much under the episcopal standard of girth should think of blowing: of this I feel a perfect conviction. As for my solitary second-class man, the unique character of his blowing, or breathing, may have been but an emanation of his unique mind. He was, as the song says, “werry pecooliar”--an extensive medical practitioner among the poor, though not a medical man--the editor of an agricultural journal, though unacquainted with farming--a moral man, yet the avowed admirer of the lady of an invalid whose expected death was to be the signal for their union: the death came, but the union was never effected. Groping then, as I do, in the dark, I would with great diffidence submit, that _certain_ individuals, being encumbered with PRIDE, WEALTH, and FAT, are hence, somehow, under both a mental and physical necessity of blowing: why _all_ individuals thus encumbered do not adopt the practice, is matter for consideration. As a further clue to investigation I may add, that although the union of the above three qualifications in one individual is by no means peculiar to Dublin, yet in Dublin alone have I ever seen men blow, and that none of my quaternion of blowing men was of Milesian descent: one was of Saxon, another of Scottish race, and the remaining two were sprung from Huguenots.