THE FITZ-BOODLE PAPERS.* FITZ-BOODLE'S CONFESSIONS. PREFACE. GEORGE FITZ-BOODLE, ESQUIRE, ΤΟ Omnium Club, May 20, 1842. a cocktail), I was, I say, forced to give him up my cob in exchange for four ponies which I owed him. Thus, as I never walk, being a heavy man whom nobody cares to mount, my time hangs heavily on my hands; and Donsidered the third-best whist- as I hate home, or that apology for it player in Europe, and (though never -a bachelor's lodgings and as I betting more than five pounds) have have nothing earthly to do now until for many years past added consider- I can afford to purchase another horse, ably to my yearly income by my skill I spend my time in sauntering from in the game, until the commencement one club to another, passing many of the present season, when a French rather listless hours in them before gentleman, Monsieur Lalouette, was the men come in. admitted to the club where I usually play. His skill and reputation were so great, that no men of the club were inclined to play against us two of a side; and the consequence has been, that we have been in a manner pitted against one another. By a strange turn of luck (for I cannot admit the idea of his superiority), Fortune, since the Frenchman's arrival, has been almost constantly against me, and I have lost two and thirty nights in the course of a couple score of nights' play. Everybody knows that I am a poor man; and so much has Lalouette's luck drained my finances, that only last week I was obliged to give him that famous gray cob on which you have seen me riding in the Park (I can't afford a thorough-bred, and hate 1842. You will say, Why not take to backgammon, or écarté, or amuse yourself with a book? Sir (putting out of the question the fact that I do not play upon credit), I make a point never to play before candles are lighted; and as for books, I must candidly confess to you I am not a reading man. 'Twas but the other day that some one recommended me to read your Magazine after dinner, saying it contained an exceedingly witty article upon-I forget what. I give you my honor, sir, that I took up the work at six, meaning to amuse myself till seven, when Lord Trumpington's dinner was to come off, and egad! in two minutes I fell asleep, and never woke till midnight. Nobody ever thought of looking for me in the library, where nobody ever "The Fitz-Boodle Papers" first appeared in "Fraser's Magazine" for the year goes; and so ravenously hungry was I, that I was obliged to walk off to Crockford's for supper. What is it that makes you literary persons so stupid? I have met_various individuals in society who I was told were writers of books, and that sort of thing, and, expecting rather to be amused by their conversation, have invariably found them dull to a degree, and as for information, without a particle of it. Sir, I actually asked one of these fellows, "What was the nick to seven?" and he stared in my face, and said he didn't know. He was hugely over-dressed in satin, rings, chains, and so forth; and at the beginning of dinner was disposed to be rather talkative and pert; but my little sally silenced him, I promise you, and got up a good laugh at his expense too. "Leave George alone," said little Lord Cinqbars, "I warrant he'll be a match for any of you literary fellows." Cinqbars is no great wiseacre; but, indeed, it requires no great wiseacre to know that. What is the simple deduction to be drawn from this truth? Why, this that a man to be amusing and well-informed, has no need of books at all, and had much better go to the world and to men for his knowledge. There was Ulysses, now, the Greek fellow engaged in the Trojan war, as I dare say you know; well, he was the cleverest man possible, and how? From having seen men and cities, their manners noted and their realms surveyed, to be sure. So have I. I have been in every capital, and can order a dinner in every language in Europe. My notion, then, is this. I have a great deal of spare time on my hands, and as I am told you pay a handsome sum to persons writing for you, I will furnish you occasionally with some of my views upon men and things; occasional histories of my acquaintance, which I think may amuse you; personal narratives of my own; essays, and what not. I am told that I do not spell correctly. This, of course, I don't know; but you will remember that Richelieu and Marlborough could not spell, and, egad! I am an honest man, and desire to be no better than they. I know that it is the matter, and not the manner, which is of importance. Have the goodness, then, to let one of your understrappers correct the spelling and the grammar of my papers; and you can give him a few shillings in my name for his trouble. Begging you to accept the assurance of my high consideration, I am, sir, Your obedient servant, GEORGE SAVAGE FITZ-BOODLE. P.S. By the way, I have said in my letter that I found all literary persons vulgar and dull. Permit me to contradict this with regard to yourself. I met you once at Blackwall, I think it was, and really did not remark any thing offensive in your accent or appearance. BEFORE Commencing the series of moral disquisitions, &c., which I intend, the reader may as well know who I am, and what my past course of life has been. To say that I am a Fitz-Boodle is to say at once that I am a gentleman. Our family has held the estate of Boodle ever since the reign of Henry II.; and it is out of no ill will to my elder brother, or unnatural desire for his death, but only because the estate is a very good one, that I wish heartily it was mine: I would say as much of Chatsworth or Eton Hall. I am not, in the first place, what is called a ladies' man, having contracted an irrepressible habit of smoking after dinner, which has obliged me to give up a great deal of the dear creatures' society; nor can I go much to country-houses for the same reason. Say what they will, ladies do not like you to smoke in their bed-rooms; their silly little noses scent out the odor upon the chintz, weeks after you have left them. Sir John has been 66 caught coming to bed particularly merry and redolent of cigar-smoke; young George, from Eton, was absolutely found in the little green-house puffing an Havanna; and when discovered, they both lay the blame upon Fitz-Boodle. "It was Mr. Fitz-Boodle, mamma," says George, "who offered me the cigar, and I did not like to refuse him." "That rascal Fitz seduced us, my dear," says Sir John, "and kept us laughing until past midnight." Her ladyship instantly sets me down as a person to be avoided. George," whispers she to her boy, promise me, on your honor, when you go to town, not to know that man. And when she enters the breakfast-room for prayers, the first greeting is a peculiar expression of countenance, and inhaling of breath, by which my lady indicates the presence of some exceedingly disagreeable odor in the room. She makes you the faintest of courtesies, and regards you, if not with a flashing eye," as in the novels, at least with a "distended nostril." During the whole of the service, her heart is filled with the blackest gall towards you; and she is thinking about the best means of getting you out of the house. beard, the women of the harem do not disturb his meditations, but only add to the delight of them by tinkling on a dulcimer and dancing before him. When Professor Strumpff of Göttingen takes down No. 13 from the wall, with a picture of Beatrice Cenci upon it, and which holds a pound of canaster, the Frau Professorin knows that for two hours Hermann is engaged, and takes up her stockings and knits in quiet. The constitution of French society has been quite changed within the last twelve years: an ancient and respectable dynasty has been overthrown; an aristocracy which Napoleon could never master has disappeared and from what cause? I do not hesitate to say, from the habit of smoking. Ask any man whether, five years before the revolution of July, if you wanted a cigar at Paris, they did not bring you a roll of tobacco with a straw in it? Now, the whole city smokes; society is changed; and be sure of this, ladies, a similar combat is going on in this country at present between cigar-smoking and you. Do you suppose you will conquer? Look over the wide world, and see that your adversary has overcome it. Germany has been puffing for threescore What is this smoking that it should years; France smokes to a man. be considered a crime? I believe in you think you can keep the enemy my heart that women are jealous of out of England? Psha! look at his it, as of a rival. They speak of it as progress. Ask the club-houses, Have of some secret, awful vice that seizes they smoking-rooms, or not? Are upon a man, and makes him a pariah they not obliged to yield to the genefrom genteel society. I would lay a ral want of the age, in spite of the guinea that many a lady who has just resistance of the old women on the been kind enough to read the above committees? I, for my part, do not lines lays down the book, after this despair to see a bishop lolling out of confession of mine that I am a smoker," The Athenæum" with a cheroot in and says, "Oh, the vulgar wretch !" his mouth, or, at any rate, a pipe stuck and passes on to something else. in his shovel-hat. Do The fact is, that the cigar is a But as in all great causes and in rival to the ladies, and their conqueror promulgating new and illustrious thetoo. In the chief pipe-smoking na-ories, their first propounders and extions they are kept in subjection. ponents are generally the victims of While the chief, Little White Belt, their enthusiasm, of course the first smokes, the women are silent in his preachers of smoking have been wigwam; while Mahomet Ben Jaw- martyrs, too; and George Fitzbrahim causes volumes of odorous in- Boodle is one. The first gas-man cense of Latakia to play round his was ruined; the inventor of steam I 66 sprung towards that unfortunate person, to set him an imposition. Every thing, in fact, but tobacco he could forgive. Why did cursed fortune bring him into the rooms over mine? The odor of the cigars made his gentle spirit quite furious; and one luckless morning, when I was standing before my oak," and chanced to puff a great bouffée of Varinas into his face, he forgot his respect for my family altogether (I was the second son, and my brother a sickly creature then, he is now sixteen stone in weight, and has a half-score of children); gave me severe lecture, to which I replied rather hotly, as was my wont. And then came demand for an apology; refusal on my part; appeal to the dean; convocation; and rustication of George Savage Fitz-Boodle. a engine printing became a pauper. began to smoke in days when the task was one of some danger, and paid the penalty of my crime. I was flogged most fiercely for my first cigar; for, being asked to dine one Sunday evening with a half-pay colonel of dragoons (the gallant, simple, humorous Shortcut- heaven bless him! - I have had many a guinea from him who had so few), he insisted upon my smoking in his room at "The Salopian," and the consequence was, that I became so violently ill as to be reported intoxicated upon my return to Slaughter-House School, where I was a boarder, and I was whipped the next morning for my peccadillo. At Christ Church, one of our tutors was the celebrated lamented Otto Rose, who would have been a bishop under the present Government, had not an immoderate indulgence in water-gruel cut short his elegant and useful career. He was a good man, a pretty scholar and poet (the episode upon the discovery of eau-de-Cologne, in his prize-poem on "The Rhine," was considered a masterpiece of art, though I am not much of a judge myself upon such matters), and he was as remarkable for his fondness for a tuft as for his nervous antipathy to tobacco. As illluck would have it, my rooms (in Tom Quad) were exactly under his; In the army, my luck was much the and I was grown by this time to be a same. I joined the -th Lancers, confirmed smoker. I was a baronet's Lieut.-Col. Lord Martingale, in the son (we are of James the First's year 1817. I only did duty with the creation), and I do believe our tutor regiment for three months. We were could have pardoned any crime in the quartered at Cork, where I found the world but this. He had seen me in a Irish doodheen and tobacco the tandem, and at that moment was pleasantest smoking possible; and seized with a violent fit of sneezing- was found by his lordship, one day (sternutatory paroxysm he called it) upon stable duty, smoking the shortat the conclusion of which I was a est, dearest little dumpy clay-pipe in mile down the Woodstock Road. He the world. had seen me in pink, as we used to call it, swaggering in the open sunshine across a grass-plat in the court; but spied out opportunely a servitor, one Todhunter by name, who was going to morning chapel with his forthwith shoestring untied, and My father had taken a second wife (of the noble house of Flintskinner), and Lady Fitz-Boodle detested smok ing, as a woman of her high princi ples should. She had an entire mastery over the worthy old gentleman, and thought I was a sort of demon of wickedness. The old man went to his grave with some similar notion,- heaven help him! and left me but the wretched twelve thousand pounds secured to me on my poor mother's property. "Cornet Fitz-Boodle," said my lord, in a towering passion, "from what blackguard did you get that pipe?" I omit the oaths which garnished invariably his lordship's conversation. "I got it, my lord," said I, from |