Does it pay to smoke? / by an old smoker.

  • James Parton
Date:
[1872?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Does it pay to smoke? / by an old smoker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    august Mothers of our race. It tends to make us regard women from what we may style the Black Crook point of view. The young man who boasted that he had seen the Black Crook forty-seven times in three months must have been an irreclaimable smoker. Nothing but the dulled, sensualized masculinity caused by this peculiar poison could have blinded men to the ghastly and haggard ugliness of that exhibition. The pinched and painted vacancy of those poor girls’ faces; the bony horrors of some of their necks, and the flabby redundancy of others ; the cheap and tawdry splen¬ dours ; the stale rejected tricks of London panto¬ mimes ; three or four tons of unhappy girls sus¬ pended in the air in various agonizing attitudes,— to think that such a show could have run for seven¬ teen months ! Even if science did not justify the con¬ jecture, I should be disposed, for the honour of human nature, to lay the blame of all this upon tobacco. To a man who is uncorrupt and properly consti¬ tuted woman remains always something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem, and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel bindings. Not till she has been utterly conquered and crushed by
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