TWELVE GOLDEN RULES FOR CIGAR-SMOKERS

Preface

Some years have elapsed since I first began to ameliorate the Art of Smoking. When I took the subject up, ninety-nine gentlemen out of a hundred were in a state of most lamentable ignorance as to the proper mode of enjoying that exquisite luxury—a Cigar! Shades of Raleigh and Porson and Parr! how they abused the weed divine! Scarcely one man in a million knew how to spell Tobacco in the graceful and convenient form which modern genius had conferred upon it. SEGAR was the horrid orthography throughout the British dominions! This—thanks to the patriotic exertions of Lord Byron, Professor Wilson, and myself, is now no longer met with, except occasionally in villanous black frames, at old brokers' shops, in tortuous bye-lanes, or small blind alleys—where the youngster, haply beguiled thitherward, stops and gazes at it, like the geologist on a fossil species now extinct, as a venerable relic of the by-gone world:—yet I have heard of no colossal pillar being erected to our honour; —but the world will appreciate us, perhaps, when we are all past.
Then, how savagely—how ruthlessly— how ignorantly—how impotently were Cigars used, as well in shops as society! Cigar-smoking seemed to be a new faculty to man, which he neither knew how to appreciate or enjoy. Pitying the condition of my fellow-creatures, I wielded my pen, and, in a few magical lines, told them how to use the blessing they abused. The subsequent rules—originally intended for separate publication—first appeared in another work; the extensive circulation of which gratified my philanthropy; and, without doing more on the subject, I should have gone to the grave, proud of my existence, because it had conferred a splendid benefit on mankind: but the smoking public and its purveyors have dragged me from the bower where I reposed in peace, beneath the shadow of my well-earned laurels. At first they attempted to wheedle me with compliments; —next with splendid presents of Cigars: but all would not do,—until they appealed to me, in a body, as The Father Of Cigar-smokers, to come forth from my delectable and halcyon snuggery—" much-loved of many"—and see how the juveniles still treated my darling protégée— a Cigar!

I came—I went to the shops at eventide —I saw—and I relented. Cigar-smoking, among the race of those whom I am proud to term my immediate pupils— the men who, to be decent, shave daily —is just as it should be; but the junior smokers don't seem to be half awake yet! I confess the appalling, and—to me— most mortifying fact: but I can't account for it. They don't know a good Cigar from a bad one; they paw the beauties in a box as though they hadn't the use of their eyes; they bruise, crush, squeeze, pinch, crack, toss about and otherwise grievously maltreat, what ought to be touched with as much delicacy as a waxen rosebud! Some of them light the wrong end; many of them impiously bite off the twist; and most of them smoke two-thirds of the right side of a Cigar before a spark of fire has touched the left. This convinced me that my business in this world was not yet done; and I determined on reprinting my Golden Rules, in that form for which they were originally intended. Here they are, and if the incipient smoking public do not take advantage of them, I can't help it, and things must take their course.