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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    was Goethe,—perhaps the nearest approach to the complete human being that has yet appeared. The mere fact that this admirable person lived always unpolluted by this seductive poison is a fact of some significance; but the important fact is, that he could not have smoked and remained Goethe. When we get close to the man, and live intimately with him, we perceive the impossibility of his ever having been a smoker. We can as easily fancy Desdemona smoking a cigarette as the highly groomed, alert, refined, imperial Goethe with a cio-ar in his mouth. In America, the best gentle- man and most variously learned and accomplished man we have had,—the man, too, who had in him most of what will constitute the glory of the future, —was Thomas Jefferson, Democrat, of Virginia. He was versed in six languages; he danced, rode, and hunted as well as General Washington; he played the violin well, wrote admirably, farmed skilfully and was a most generous, affectionate, humane, and great-souled human being. It was the destiny of this ornament and consolation of his species to raise tobacco, and live by tobacco all his life. But he knew too much to use it himself; or, to speak more correctly, his fine feminine senses, his fine masculine instincts, revolted from the use of it, without any assistance from his understanding.
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