Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/844

824 fritter away their minds and tempers on an infinity of pursuits, pursuits of business and pursuits of pleasure. If they did not all attain Wordsworth's "sweet calm" or the "wide and luminous view" of Goethe, at least they did not insist on barring the way to those blessed goals. This hasty life of ours, these successive shocks of change and alarm, this want of rest and leisure, all act or tend to act injuriously on the stomach, and thence on the brain. It is not only our unwise diet which afflicts the race with those "dolorous pains in the epigastrium," which one very learned lecturer on the philosophy of food asserts to be the note of this age—and which I take to be a glorified form of the homely stomach-ache.

I suspect, too, tobacco may have something to say to it. Not that I would say a word against that "plant divine of rarest virtue" for those who can use it, being indeed myself a feeble unit of the society of "blest tobacco-boys." An ingenious seeker after truth not long ago published the result of his research into the effect of tobacco and strong drink on the studious brain. It was a curious book, extremely amusing, and not all so foolish as might be supposed. But some random utterances there were, and none so random as those of one abstemious student (nameless, if I remember right, but the style was much the later style of Mr. Ruskin) who violently denounced tobacco as a general curse, and refused it all virtues, on the ground that the great men of old did very well without it. "Homer sang his deathless song," so wrote this fearful man; "Raphael painted his glorious Madonnas, Luther preached, Guttenberg printed, Columbus discovered a new world, before tobacco was heard of. No rations of tobacco were served out to the heroes of Thermopylæ; no cigar strung up the nerves of Socrates." Why, truly; and Agamemnon I speak, of course, under correction of Doctor Schliemann—Agamemnon, I say, knew not the name of Cockle, and Ulysses had never heard of the lively and refreshing invention of the ingenious Mr. Eno; yet who will reason from that old-world ignorance that we might grow wise as Ulysses and brave as Agamemnon if we put away these artificial stimulants? Nay, if it comes to that, have not some fine things too been done since tobacco was introduced? But we need not take this modern counter-blast too seriously. Probably men of sedentary habits who smoke much are very moderate drinkers. He who takes tobacco because he likes the flavor, and finds the use refreshing and soothing, is not likely to take wine or other strong drinks in any quantity. I do not mean that he will not consume them together; that no man capable of appreciating either will ever do. How sad soever be the errors we have fallen into, at least we no longer share Madame Purganti's confusion of mistaking tobacco for a "concomitant of claret." But the virtue of each—I am not thinking of those who use them merely from habit, or because others do, or for a purely sensual pleasure—the virtue of each is, I fancy, a little marred by an adherence to