Learning, it has been said, may be an instrument of fraud: so may bread, if discharged from the mouth of a cannon, be an instrument of death.—Bentham.
THE SNUFF SHOP.
Few, we dare say, ever entered a shop of the description named in the title of this paper with any other idea than that they were entering merely a repository of Lundy Foot, cigars, and small twist. Few, we suppose, ever looked on such a place in any other light, or ever considered its keeper in any other point of view than that simply of a tobacconist. Yet is there another light, and a dismal one it is, in which both the snuff shop and the snuff dealer himself may be looked upon; and it is in such a light that we ourselves always do look upon them. This is, viewing the one as a charnel-house of defunct authors; the other as a goul, battening on their mortal remains. We sometimes vary this horrifying, but, alas! too correct view of the snuff shop and the snuff dealer, by supposing the one a sort of literary shambles or slaughter-house, and the other a cold-blooded, merciless literary butcher.
Taking either of these views of the snuff shop, what a change takes place in its aspect, and in that of every thing and person pertaining to it! What a dismal and hideous den it then becomes, and what a truculent, savage-looking fiend becomes that smiling and simpering tobacconist! No bowels of compassion has he for the mangled and mutilated authors that are lying thick around him, cruelly Burked by his own merciless hands. No; there he sits in the midst of the dire carnage as calm and unconcerned as if he had nothing whatever to do with it—the callous monster!
Pursuing the idea just broached, let us enter this horrid den, and for a moment contemplate its interior in a spirit in accordance with that idea; for, not being authors, we have nothing to fear for ourselves, it being that class only that need stand in awe of the snuff shop—to all others it is a harmless place enough.
Lo! then, behold (giving us the advantage here of a little stretch of imagination), the walls bespattered with the blood and brains of murdered authors; and see that blood-stained bench which the demon of the place calls a counter; and in various other depositories around lie their dismembered limbs and mangled carcases. Oh, it is a shocking and heart-rending sight!
Some of those unfortunates have evidently died hard: they have the appearance of having struggled desperately for life. But, alas, in vain! An irresistible destiny thrust them into the fatal snuff shop, where they perished quickly and miserably by the hand of the ruthless savage within. Others, again, seem to have quietly resigned themselves to their fate, and, indeed, to have been more than half dead before they were brought in; while others, again, appear to have been wholly defunct, having died a natural death. These, then, have been conveyed thither merely to be cut up, and converted to the degrading uses of the tobacconist.
Although some of the unhappy authors whose mangled remains strew this den of horrors seem to have attained a kind of maturity before they were cruelly torn to pieces as we now see them, by far the greater number are a sort of murdered innocents, having been strangled in their birth, or shortly after. A good many there are, too, who seem to have been dead born, or to have perished while yet in embryo.
Piteous as it is to look on the heavy, sturdy corpses of the murdered prose writers that lie thickly up and down this chamber of death, yet infinitely more piteous is it to contemplate the delicate, fragile forms of the poets thus cruelly mangled and mutilated that lie no less thickly around us. Poor dear, unfledged things! What a fate has been thine!—what a destiny, to be consigned, ere ye had yet opportunity to open your little musical throats, to the tender mercies of that literary Burke—that ruthless monster whom the world, thinking of him only in connection with cigars and pigtail, calls a tobacconist. Where now, sweet little humming birds, be those soft and tender notes with which ye sought, alas, how vainly! to charm the huge, rude ear of an uncouth and barbarous world that would not listen to ye? Alas, they have ceased for ever! How little does that savage, the demon of the place, mind your sweet, small voices, that give forth a piteous wail, like the last notes of the dying swan, every time he lays his merciless hands on you. Little, indeed! Let but a customer come in for half an ounce of “Blackguard,” and he will, without the smallest hesitation or compunction, seize one of you, dear unfortunates, and tear you limb from limb for his own and that customer’s conveniency: ay, for a paltry three half-pence, mayhap less—a pennyworth of “Scotch”—will he perpetrate this atrocious deed. That sanguinary bench, that horrid counter, is strewn over with your slim carcases and fragile limbs; and your murderer is hanging over your mutilated remains, laughing and chatting and joking with his customers as pleasantly and unconcernedly as if you were so much waste paper. Oh, it is atrocious!
Such, then, dear reader, is the light—a terrible one, indeed, but as thou wilt acknowledge, we have no doubt, a correct one—in which we look upon snuff shops, which, as thou well knowest, have long lain, and not unjustly, under the stigma of being fatal to authors. If thou art one, pray, then, eschew it; for if thou dost once enter its dismal portals, thou wilt never, never more be heard of in this world!