It was something like drinking of smoke that Napoleon accomplished in his unsuccessful smoking campaign. He once took a fancy to try to smoke. Everything was prepared for him, and his Majesty took the amber mouth-piece of the narghilè between his lips; he contented himself with opening and shutting his mouth alternately, without in the least drawing his breath. “The devil,” he replied—“why, there’s no result!” It was shewn that he made the attempt badly, and the proper method practically exhibited to him. At last he drew in a mouthful, when the smoke—which he had discovered the means of drawing in, but knew not how to expel—found its way into his throat, and thence by his nose, almost blinding him. As soon as he recovered breath, he cried out—“Away with it! What an abomination! Oh! the hog—my stomach turns!” In fact, the annoyance continued for an hour, and he renounced for ever a habit which, he said, was fit only to amuse sluggards. Although Napoleon managed to fail, thousands less mighty have managed to succeed. There is a curious kind of legend mentioned in Brand’s Antiquities, by way of accounting for the frequent use and continuance of taking tobacco, for the veracity of which he declares that he will not vouch. “When the Christians first discovered America, the devil was afraid of losing his hold of the people there by the appearance of Christianity. He is reported to have told some Indians of his acquaintance, that he had found a way to be revenged on the Christians for beating up his quarters, for he would teach them to take tobacco, to which, when they had once tasted it, they should become perpetual slaves.” Without venturing to authenticate this strange story, in the moral of which Napoleon would have concurred—with a mental reservation in favour of snuff—after the above defeat, let us console tobacco lovers, that whilst the success of the first temptation closed the gates of Paradise, the success of the second opens them again. The following from an old collection of epigrams is, in every respect, worthy of the theme. “All dainty meats I do defie, Which feed men fat as swine; He is a frugal man indeed That on a leaf can dine. He needs no napkin for his hands His fingers’ ends to wipe, That keeps his kitchen in a box, And roast meat in a pipe.” In Hamburg, 40,000 cigars are smoked daily in a population scarcely amounting to 45,000 adult males. And in London, the consumption must be considerable to furnish, from the profits of retailing, a living to 1566 tobacconists. In England, we may presume that the largest smoker of tobacco must be the Queen, since an immense kiln at the docks, called the Queen’s pipe, is occasionally lighted and primed with hundredweights of tobacco, sea damaged or otherwise spoiled, at the same time blowing a cloud “Which Turks might envy, Africans adore.”