Page:The Anatomy of Tobacco.pdf/17

 delight of art; and this second proposition—enunciated long ago by Bacon—may be reckoned my subsidiary or corollary bee.

But it is the earlier proposition that I now have in my mind: The infinite variety of all things, men included. I have before me a queer little book called: "The Anatomy of Tobacco: or Smoking Methodised, Divided, and Considered after a New Fashion. By Leolinus Silwriensis, Professor of Fumifical Philosophy in the University of Brentford." It bears the date 1884. It was written by me forty years ago, in the twentieth year of my age. And, I hope I need not add; it is as bad a little book as well can be. It is a hodge-podge of tobacco pipes and easy schoolboy scholarship, and Latin and Greek tags, and a great deal of Scholastic Logic, and a sort of thin skimming of philosophy obtained from Tennemann's "Manual of the History of Philosophy," and a good deal of the manner of that famous old book, Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"; with all the odds and ends and scourings and rinsings of the poor