Those cigars! Oh, those cigars! I never smoked the like of those cigars! They beat General Thouvenot's out of the field. They were at least three years old--nearer two pounds of them than one. You may have smoked a good cigar. You may have smoked an old cigar. But these united the two qualities; they were both old and good. The military son had brought them with him from Spain, and left them on his return to the army. The gift of them to me, then, implied a melancholy sentiment; _he_ could not want them. This was expressed by the father, in making the present. It was touching--it was perfectly French. They had one fault, only one; a fault from which no old cigars are free. They were gone too soon; they burned out like tinder. But oh! while they were burning, how shall I describe the sensation! Sensation? It was more than that; it was mental elevation; a vision, a trance, a transfer to the regions of hope, imagination, and enchantment. Every-day nature became prismatic. Matter-of-fact sparkled with variegated lamps. Pledget might have smoked, and fancied himself a poet. Each cigar a tranquillising stimulant, a volatile anodyne, excited, and while it excited soothed, every faculty of the soul; fancy, sentiment, recollection, anticipation, and stern resolve. But ah, my cigar is out! A few puffs have sufficed! Too soon, too soon, it begins to burn my nose! Its last, its dying odours are hurried away by the envious breeze; and the visions which they inspired are gone like a beautiful dream!
[3] _A Month at Constantinople._ By ALBERT SMITH. London: 1850.
Books of travel in the region which modern tourists particularly designate as "the East," and which may be considered to comprise Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, do not, as a class, very forcibly challenge our sympathy and criticism. The best horse may be ridden to death; and no country, however rich in associations and peculiar in its characteristics, however remarkable in configuration and interesting by its traditions, can yield continual fresh pastures to literary travellers, when they descend upon it like a swarm of locusts instead of dropping in at reasonable intervals. Time must be allowed for change and reproduction, or repetition and exhaustion will be the inevitable result. The East, moreover, as a theme for book-wrights, has not only been overdone, but, in many instances, very badly done. People have gone thither with the preconceived idea of publishing, on the strain for the marvellous, the romantic, and the picturesque; and, disdaining the common-sense course of setting down what they saw and giving their real and natural impressions, they have gilt and embellished, like a coach-painter at a sheriff's carriage, till they forced upon us the conviction that they cared more for glitter than for truth. Some, piquing themselves on diplomatic acumen, have filled their volumes with politics, and settled all manner of Eastern questions much to their own satisfaction, and greatly to the weariness of their readers; and these form perhaps the most intolerable of the many classes into which Oriental travellers are subdivisible, but which we shall not here further enumerate, preferring to turn to the examination of the latest Eastern tour that has issued from the English press and found its way to our critical sanctum.