 CHAPTER 5 Smoking in the Restoration Period The Indian weed withered quite green at noon, cut down at night, shows thy decay, all fleshes hay, thus think, then drink, tobacco. George wither 1588 to 1667. The year 1660 that restored Charles II to this throne restored a gaiety and brightness not to say frivolity of tone that had long been absent from English life. The following song in Praise of Tobacco, taken from a collection which was printed in 1660, is touched with the spirit of the time. Though it is really founded on, and to no small extent taken from, some verses in Praise of Tobacco written by Samuel Rowlands in his Naive of Clubs 1611. To feed on flesh is gluttony, it maketh men fat like swine, but is not he a frugal man that on a leaf can dine? He needs no linen for to foul his fingers ends to wipe that has his kitchen in a box and roast meat in a pipe. The cause where from few rich men's sons proved disputance in schools is that their fathers fed on flesh and they begat fat fools. This fulsome feeding clogs the brain and doth the stomach choke, but he is a brave spark that can dine with one light dish of smoke. There is nothing to show that King Charles smoked, nor what his personal attitude towards tobacco may have been. His majesty was pleased, however, in a letter to Cambridge University, officially to condemn smoking by Parsons, as at the same time he condemned the practice of wig-wearing and of sermon reading by the clergy. But the royal frown was without effect. Wigs soon covered nearly every clerical head from the bench of bishops downwards, and it is very doubtful indeed whether a single Parsons put his pipe out. Clouds were blown under archie-episcopal roofs. At Lambert Palace, one Sunday in February 1672, John Eichard, the author of the famous book or tract on the contempt of the clergy, 1670, which Macaulay turned to such account, dined with Archbishop Sheldon. He sat at the lower end of the table between Archbishop's two chaplains, and when dinner was finished, Sheldon, we are told, retired to his withdrawing room, while Eichard went with the chaplains and another, convived to their lodgings to drink and smoke. If the restored king did not himself smoke, tobacco was far from unknown at the Palace of Whitehall. We get a curious glimpse of one aspect of life there in the picture which Lily, the notorious astrologer, paints in his story of his arrest in January 1661. He was taken to Whitehall at night, and kept in a large room with some sixty other prisoners till daylight, when he was transferred to the guard room, which he says, I thought to be hell. Some therein were sleeping, others swearing, others smoking tobacco. In the chimney of the room, I believe, there was two bushels of broken tobacco pipes, almost half one load of ashes. What would the king's grandfather, the author of the counter-blast, have said? Could he have imagined such a spectacle within the palace walls? The monk, to whom Charles II owed so much, is said to have indulged in the unpleasant habit of chewing tobacco, and to have been imitated by others, but the practice can never have been common. Tobacco was still the symbol of good fellowship. Win Stanley, who was an enemy of what he called this heathenish weed, and who thought the folly of smoking might never have spread so much if stringent means of prevention had been exercised, yet had to declare in 1660 that tobacco itself is by few taken now as medicinal, it has grown a good fellow, and fallen from a physician to a compliment. He's no good fellow that's without burnt pipes, tobacco, and his tinder-box. At the time of the restoration, tobacco boxes which were considered suitable to the occasion were made in larger numbers. The outside of the lid bore a portrait of the royal martyr. Within the lid was a picture of the restored king, His Majesty King Charles II. While on the inside of the bottom of the box was a representation of Oliver Cromwell leaning against a post, a gallows tree tied over his head, and about his neck a halter tied to the tree, while beside him was pictured the devil wide-mouthed. Another form of memorial tobacco box is described in an advertisement in the London Gazette of September 15, 1687. This was a silver box which had either been taken out of the bull's head tavern chief side, or left in the Hackney coach. It was engraved on the lid with a coat of arms, etc., and a medal of Charles I fastened to the inside of the lid, and engraved on the inside to Jacob Smith, it doth belong, at the Black Lion and High Hall-Born, date August 1671. Smokers of the period were often curious in tobacco boxes. Mr. Richard Stapley, gentleman of Twinham Sussex, whose diary is full of curious information, was presented in 1691 by his friend Mr. John Hill with a tobacco box made of tortoise. Seven years earlier Stapley had sold to Hill his silver tobacco box for ten shilling and cash. The rest of the value of the box he noted, I freely forgave him for writing at our first commission for me, and for copying of answers and ye-like in our law concerns. So it I reckoned I have as good as thirty shilling for my box, five shilling he gave me, and five shilling more he promised to pay me, and I had his steel box with the bargain, and full of smoke. Finally Mr. Hill's secretarial labors were valued at twenty shillings. The same Sussex Squire bought a pound of tobacco in December 1685 for twenty pence, which seems decidedly cheap, and on the following year a five pound box for seven shilling six pence, which was cheaper still. A Sussex rector, the Reverend Giles Moore of Horsted Canes, in 1656 and again in 1662, paid one shilling for two ounces of tobacco, i.e. at the rate of eight shillings per pound. Presumably the rector bought the more expensive Spanish tobacco, and the Squire the cheaper, Virginian. At the annual parish feast held at St. Brides, Fleet Street, London on May 24, 1666, the expenses included three pence for tobacco for twenty or more adults. This too was doubtless Virginian or colonial tobacco. The North Elmham Church Accounts, Norfolk for 1673, showed that twelve shillings for pence was paid for, quote, butter, cheese, bread, cakes, beer and tobacco, and tobacco pipes at the going of the rounds of the town, end of quote. On the occasion of a similar perambulation of the parish boundaries in 1714 to 15, the church wardens paid for beer, pipes, and tobacco cakes and wine. The account books of the church and parish of St. Stephen and Norwich for 1696-97 showed two shilling as the price of a pound of tobacco. These entries and many others of similar import showed that at feasts and at social and convivial gatherings of all kind, tobacco maintained its ascendancy. Pipes and tobacco were included in the usual provisions for city feasts, mayoral and other, and smoking was made a particular feature of the Lord Mayor's show of 1672. A contemporary pamphleteer says that in the show of that year were two extreme great giants, each of them at least fifteen foot high, who do sit and are drawn by horses in two several chariots, moving talking and taking tobacco as they ride along, to the great admiration and delight of all the spectators. Among the guests at a wedding in London in 1683 were the Lord Mayor, Sheriff and Aldermen of the City, the Lord Chief Justice, the afterwards notorious Jeffries, and other big-wigs. Evelyn records with grave disapproval that, quote, these great men spent the rest of the afternoon till eleven at night in drinking health, taking tobacco, and talking much beneath the gravity of judges who had by the day or two before condemned Mr. Algernon Sidney, end of quote. Although smoking was general among Parsons, yet attacks on tobacco were occasionally heard from pulpits. A Lancashire preacher named Thomas Jolly, who was one of the ministers ejected from church livings by the act of uniformity of 1662, has left a manuscript diary relating to his religious work. In it, under date 1687, he mentions that he had spoken against the inordinate affection to and the immoderate use of tobacco, which did cause much trouble in some of my hearers and some reformation did follow. He then goes on to record two remarkable examples of such reformation, examples he says which did stir me up in that case more than ordinary, the one I had from my reverent brother, Mr. Robert Whitaker, concerning a professor, i.e. a person who professed to have been converted, who could not follow his calling without his pipe in his mouth, but that text Isaiah 55, II, coming into his mind, he laid aside his taking of tobacco. The other instance was of a profane person living nigh Aslington, who was but poor, and took up his time in the trade of smoking, and also spent what should relieve his poor family. This man dreamed that he was taking tobacco, and that the devil stood by him, filling one pipe up on another for him. In the morning he fell to his old course, not withstanding, thinking it was but a dream. But when he came to take his pipe, he had such an apprehension that the devil did indeed stand by him, and do the office as he dreamed, that he was struck speechless for a time. And when he came to himself, he threw his tobacco in the fire, at his pipe set to walls, resolving never to meddle more with it, so much money as was formerly wasted by the week in to serving his family afterward, weekly. Among the many medicinal virtues attributed to tobacco was its supposed value as a preservative from contagion at times of plague. Hearn, the antiquary, writing early in 1721, said that he had been told that in the great plague of London in 1665 none of those who kept tobacco in his shops suffered from it, and his belief, no doubt, enhanced the medical reputation of the weed. I've also seen it stated that during the cholera epidemics of 1831, 1849, and 1866 not one London tobacco-nist died from that disease, but good authority for the statement seems to be lacking. Hutton, in his history of Derby, says that when that town was visited by the plague in 1665, that at the headless cross the market people, having their mouths primed with tobacco as a preservative, brought their provisions, it was observed that this cruel affliction never attempted the premises of a tobacco-nist, a tanner, or a shoemaker. Whatever ground there may have been for the belief in the prophylactic effect of smoking, there can be no doubt that in the 17th century it was firmly held. Howell, in one of his familiar letters dated January 1st, 1646, says that the smoke of tobacco is one of the wholesome scents that is against all contagious airs, for it overmasters all other smells, as King James, they say, found true, when being once a hunting, a shower of rain, drove into a big sty for shelter, where he caused a pipe full to be taken of purpose. And here Mr. Howell is certainly drawing the long bow. One cannot imagine the author of the counter-blast countenancing the use of tobacco under any circumstances. At the time of the great plague all kinds of nostrums were sold and recommended as preservatives or as cures. Most of these perished with the occasion that called them forth. But the names of some have been preserved in a rare quarto tract, which was published in the plague year 1665, entitled, A Brief Treatise of the Nature Causes Science, Preservation from and Cure of the Pestilence, collected by W. Kemp, Mr. Master of Arts. In the list of devices for purifying infected air, it is stated that the American silver weed or tobacco is very excellent for this purpose, and an excellent defense against bad air, being smoked in a pipe, either by itself or with nutmegs, shreds, and raw seeds mixed with it, especially if it be nosed. Which I suppose means if the smoke be exhaled through the nose, for it cleanses the air and choketh, suppresseth, and disperthes any venomous vapor. Mr. Kemp warms to his subject and proceeds with a whole hearted panegyric that must be quoted in full. It hath singular and contrary effects. It is good to warm one being cold and will cool one being hot. All ages, all sexes, all constitutions, young and old, men and women, the sanguine, the choleric, the melancholy, the flagmatic, take it without any manifest inconvenience. It quenches thirst, and yet will make one more able and fit to drink. It abates hunger, and yet will get one a good stomach. It is agreeable with mirth or sadness, with feasting and with fasting. It will make one rest at one's sleep, and will keep on waking that is drowsy. It has an offensive smell to some, and is more desirable than any perfume to others. That it is a most excellent preservative, both experienced and reasoned to teach. It corrects the air by fumigation, and it avoids corrupt humors by salivation, for when one takes it either by chewing it in the leaf or smoking it in the pipe, the humors are drawn and brought from all parts of the body to the stomach, and from thence rising up to the mouth of the tobacco-nist as to the helm of a sublimatory are voided and spitten out. When playing was abroad, even children were compelled to smoke. At the time of the dreadful visitation of 1665, all the boys at Eaton were obliged to smoke in school every morning. One of these juvenile smokers, a certain Tom Rogers, years afterwards declared to hern, the Oxford Antiquary, that he never was whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking. Times have changed at Eaton since this anti-tobacco-nist martyr received his whipping. It is sometimes stated that this time smoking was generally practiced in schools, and that at a stated hour each morning lessons were laid aside and masters and scholars alike produced their pipes and proceeded to smoke tobacco. But I know of no authority for this wider statement. It seems to have grown out of hern's record of the practice at Eaton. The belief of the prophylactic power of tobacco was, however, very generally held. When Mr. Samuel Peeps on June 7, 1665 for the first time saw several houses marked with the ominous red cross, and the words Lord have mercy upon us chalked upon the doors, he felt so ill at ease that he was obliged to buy some rolled tobacco to smell and chew. There's nothing to show that Peeps even smoked, which, considering his proficiency in the arts of good fellowship, is perhaps a little surprising. Defoe, in his fictitious but graphic journal of the plague year in London, says that the sexton of one of the London parishes, who personally handled a large number of the victims, never had the distemperate hall, but lived about 20 years after it, and was sexton of the parish to the time of his death. This man, according to Defoe, never used any preservative against the infection, other than holding garlic and roux in his mouth and smoking tobacco. When excavations were in progress early in 1901, preparatory to the construction of Kingsway and Aldwych, they included the removal of bodies from the burying grounds of St. Clement Danes and St. Maryless Strand. And among the bones were found a couple of the curious tobacco pipes called plague pipes, because they're supposed to have been used as a protection against infection by those whose office it was to bury the dead. These pipes have been dug up from time to time, and numbers so large that one antiquary, Mr. H. Sire, coming, has ventured to infer that almost every person who ventured from home invoked the protection of tobacco. The 17th century pipes were largely made in Holland of pipe clay imported from England, to the disgust and loss of English pipe makers. In 1663 the company of tobacco pipe makers petitioned Parliament to forbid the export of tobacco pipe clay, since by the manufacture of pipes in Holland their trade is much damaged. Further, they asked for the confirmation of their Charter of Government, so as to empower them to regulate abuses, as many persons engage in the trade without license. The company's request was granted, but in the next year they again found it necessary to come to Parliament, showing the great improvement in their trade since their incorporation, 17 James I, and their threatened ruin because cooks, bakers, and alehousekeepers and others make pipes, but so unskillfully that they are brought into disesteem. They request to be comprehended in the statute of laborers of five Elizabeth, so that none may follow the trade who have not been apprentices seven years. Tobacco pipe making was a flourishing industry at this period, and throughout the 17th and following century, in most of the chief provincial towns and cities, as well as in London. Old English clays, says Mr. T. P. Cooper, are exceedingly interesting as most of them are branded with the makers' initials. Monograms and designs were stamped or molded upon the bowls and on the stems, but more generally upon the spur or flat heel of the pipe. Many pipes display on the heels various forms of lines hatched and milled, which were perhaps the earliest marks of identification adopted by the pipe makers. In a careful examination of the monograms, we are able to identify the makers of certain pipes found in quantities in various places by reference to the freeman and Burgess rolls and parish registers. During the latter half of the 17th century, English pipes were presented by colonists in America to the Indians. They subsequently became valuable as objects of barter or part-purchase value in exchange for land. In 1677, 120 pipes and 100 Jews harps were given for a strip of country near Timber Creek in New Jersey. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, purchased attractive land and 300 pipes were included in the articles given in the exchange. The French traveler Sorbier, who visited London in 1663, declared that the English were naturally lazy and spent half their time in taking tobacco. They smoked after meals he observed and conversed for a long time. There is scarce a day passes, he wrote, but a tradesman goes to the ale house or tavern to smoke with some of his friends and therefore public houses are numerous here and business goes on but slowly in the shops. But curiously enough he makes no mention of coffee houses. A little later they were too common and too much frequent and to be overlooked. An English writer on Thrift in 1676 said that it was customary for a mechanic tradesman to go to the coffee house or ale house in the morning to drink his morning's draft and there he would spend two pence and consume an hour in smoking and talking, spendering several hours of the evening in similar fashion. Country gentlemen smoked just as much as town mechanics and tradesmen. In 1688 Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, wrote to Mr. Thomas Cullum of Hosted Place, desiring to be recommended by the witty smokers of Hosted. A later Cullum, Sir John, published in 1784 a History and Antiquities of Hosted and in describing Hosted Place, which was rebuilt about 1570, says that there was a small apartment called a smoking room. A name, he says, it acquired probably soon after it was built and which it retained for with good reason as long as it stood. I should like to know what authorities, Sir John Cullum, could have made the assertion that the room was called a smoking room from so early a date as the end of the 16th century. No mention in print of a smoking room has been found for the purposes of the Oxford Dictionary earlier than 1689. In Shadwell's very fair of that date Lady Fantast says to her husband Mr. Oldwit, who loves to tell of his early meetings with Ben Johnson and other literary heroes of a bygone day, while all the Beaumont, as my daughter says, are with us in a drawing room, you have none but ill-bred witless drunkards with you in your smoking room. As Mr. Oldwit himself in another scene of the same plays as to his friends, will into my smoking room and sport about a brimmer. There was probably some excuse for his wife's remark. These country smoking rooms were known in later days as stone parlours, the floor being flagged for safety's sake, and the stone parlour in many a squire's house was a scene of much conviviality, including no doubt abundant smoking. The arrival of coffee and the establishment of coffee-houses opened a new field for the victories of tobacco. The first house was opened in St. Michael's Alley, Cornell, in 1652. Others soon followed, and in a short time the new beverage had captured the town and coffee-houses had been opened in every direction. They sold many things besides coffee and served a variety of purposes, but primarily there were temples of talk and good fellowship. The buzz of conversation and the smoke of tobacco alike filled the rooms which were the forerunners of the clubhouses of a much later day. End of Chapter 5 Queen Anne After King William III was settled on the throne the sum of six hundred thousand pounds was paid to the Dutch from the English Exchequer for money advanced in connection with his Majesty's expedition, and this amount was paid off by tobacco duties. Granger long ago remarked that most of the eminent divines and bishops of the day contributed very practically to the payment of this revolutionary debt by their large consumption of tobacco. He mentions Isaac Barrow, Dr. Barlow of Lincoln, who was as regular in smoking tobacco as at his meals and had a high opinion of its virtues, Dr. Aldrich, and other celebrated persons who flourished about this time and gave much into that practice. One of the best known of these celebrated persons was Gilbert Burnett, Bishop of Salisbury from 1689 and historian of his own times. He had the reputation of being an inveterate smoker and was caricatured with a long clay stuck through the brim of the shovel-hat on the breadth of which King William once made remark. The bishop replied that the hat was of a shape suited to his dignity, whereupon the King costically said, I hope that the hat won't turn your head. Thackeray pictures Dryden as sitting in his great chair at Will's Coffee-House, Russell Street, Covent Garden, Tobacco Pipe in hand, but there is no evidence that Dryden smoked. The snuff box was his symbol of authority. Butting wits thought themselves highly distinguished if they could obtain the honor of being allowed to take a pinch from it. Of Dr. Aldrich, who was Dean of Christchurch Oxford, and who wrote a curious catch-not-more-difficult to sing than diverting to hear, to be sung by four men smoking their pipes. An anecdote has often been related which illustrates his devotion to the weed. A bet was made by one undergraduate and taken by another that at whatever time, however early, the Dean might be visited in his own den he would be found smoking. As soon as the bet had been made the Dean was visited. The pair explained the reason for their call, when Aldrich, who must have been a good-tempered man, said, Your friend is lost, I am not smoking, only filling my pipe. John Phillips, the author of Cider and The Splendid Shilling, was an undergraduate at Christchurch during Aldrich's term of office and no doubt learned to smoke in an atmosphere so favorable to tobacco. In his Splendid Shilling, which dates from about 1700, Phillips says of the happy man with a shilling in his pocket, meanwhile he smokes and laughs at marital or pun ambiguous or conundrum quaint. But the poor shillingless wretch can only doze at home in garret vial and with a warming puff regale chilled fingers, or, from tube as black as winter chimney or well-polished jet, exhale Mundungus, ill-perfuming scent. The miserable creature, though without a shilling, yet possessed a well-colored clay. It is significant that the writer of a life of Phillips, which was prefixed to an edition of his poems, which was published in 1762, after mentioning that smoking was common at Oxford in the days of Aldrich, says apologetically, It is no wonder, therefore, that he, Phillips, fell in with the general taste. He has descended to sing its praises in more than one place. By 1762, as we shall see, smoking was quite unfashionable and consequently it was necessary to explain how it was that a poet could descend so low as to sing the praises of tobacco. Other well-known men of the late 17th century were tobacconists in the old sense of the word. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have smoked immoderately and a familiar anecdote represents him as using for the purposes of a tobacco-stopper in a fit of absent-mindedness, the little finger of a lady sitting beside him, whom he admired, but the truth of this legend is open to doubt. Thomas Hobbes, who lived to be ninety, fifteen eighty-eight to sixteen seventy-nine, was accustomed to dine at eleven o'clock, after which he smoked a pipe and then lay down and took a nap of about half an hour. No doubt he would have attributed the length of his days to the regularity of his habits. Isaac Walton, who also lived to be ninety, as the lover of the placid and contemplative life deserved to do, loved his pipe, though he seldom mentioned smoking in the complete angler. Sir Samuel Garth, poet and physician, once known to fame as the author of The Dispensary, was another pipe-lover, as is shown by his verses quoted at the head of this chapter. Dudley, the fourth Lord North, began to smoke in sixteen fifty-seven, and says Dr. Jessup, the habit grew upon him, the frequent entries for pipes and tobacco, showing that he became more and more addicted to this indulgence. Probably it afforded him some solace in the dreadful malady from which he suffered so long. Even the Stade Quakers smoked. George Fox's position in regard to tobacco was curious. He did not smoke himself, but on one occasion he was offered a pipe by a jesting youth who thought thereby to shock so saintly a person. Fox says in his journal, I looked upon him to be a forward bold lad, and tobacco I did not take. But I saw he had a flashy empty notion of religion, so I took his pipe and put it to my mouth and gave it to him again to stop him, lest his rude tongue should say I had not unity with ye creation. The incident is curious, but testifies to Fox's tolerance and breadth of outlook. Many of his followers smoked, sometimes apparently to such an extent as to cause scandal among their brethren. The following is an entry in the minutes of the friend's monthly meeting at Hardshaw Lancashire. Fourteenth of Fourth Month, 1691. It being considered that the too frequent use of smoking tobacco is inconsistent with friend's holy profession, it is desired that such as have occasion to make use thereof, take it privately, neither too publicly in their own houses, nor by the highways, streets, or in ale houses or elsewhere, tending to the abetting the common excess. Another Lancashire monthly meeting, Penceth, under date, Eighteenth, Eighth Month, 1691, suggested that friends were not to smoke during their labor or occupation, but to leave their work and take it privately, a suggestion which clearly proceeded from non-smokers. The smug propriety of these recommendations to enjoy a smoke in private is delightful. At the quarterly meeting of Aberdeen friends in 1692, a weighty paper containing several heads of solid advice and counsels to friends sent by Irish Quakers was read. These counsels abound with amusingly prim suggestions. Among them is the warning to take heed of being overcome with strong drink or tobacco, which many by custom are brought into bondage to the creature. The Aberdeen friends themselves a little later were greatly concerned at the increasing indulgence in superfluous apparel and in vain recreations among the young ones, and in 1698 they issued a paper dealing in great detail with matters of dress and deportment. Among a hundred other things treated with minutest particularity the desire is expressed that all idle and needless smoking of tobacco be foreborn. William Penn did not like tobacco and was often annoyed by it in America. Clarkson, his biographer, relates that on one occasion Penn called to see some old friends at Burlington who had been smoking, but who in consideration for his feelings had put their pipes away. Penn smelt the tobacco and noticing that the pipes were concealed, said, Well, friends, I am glad that you are at last ashamed of your old practice. Not entirely so, replied one of the company, but we preferred laying down our pipes to the danger of offending a weaker brother. Many of the tobacco boxes used in the latter part of the seventeenth century were imported from Holland. They were long or oval and were usually made of brass. They can be easily identified by their engraved subjects and Dutch inscriptions. An example in the Colchester Museum is made of copper and brass with embossed designs and inscriptions representing commerce, etc., on the base and lid. It has engraved on the sides the name and address of its owner, Barnabas Barker, Wyvernhoe, Essex. The similar boxes later made in England usually had embossed ornamentation. The local authorities in our eastern counties seem to have had some curious ideas of their own as to where tobacco should or should not be smoked. In a previous chapter we have seen that at Norwich alehousekeepers were fine for permitting smoking in their houses. At Methwold Suffolk the folk improved upon this. The court books of the manner of Methwold contain the following entry made at a court held on October 4, 1695. We agree that any person that is taken smoking tobacco in the street shall forfeit one shilling for every time so taken, and it shall be lawful for the petty constables to destrain for the same for to be put to the useful above said, that is to the use of the town. We present Nicholas Baker first smoking in the street and do immerse him one shilling. The same rule is repeated at courts held in the years 1696 and 1699, but no other fine is mentioned at any subsequent courts. The good folk at Methwold may have been adepts at petty tyranny, but such an absurd regulation must soon have become a dead letter. While we are in the eastern counties we may note that in 1694 there died at Elie an apothecary named Henry Crofts, who owned, among some other unusual items in his inventory, casks of brandy and tobacco, which shows that even at that date when regular tobacconist shops for the sale of tobacco had long been common, the old business connection between apothecaries and tobacco still occasionally existed. The clay pipes called alderman, with longer stems than their predecessors, tipped with glaze, came into use towards the end of the 17th century. They must not be confused with the much longer church warden or yard of clay, which was not invoked till the early years of the 19th century. Towards the close of the 17th century signs may be detected of some waning in the universal popularity of tobacco. There are hints of change in the records of city and other companies. Tobacco had always figured prominently in the provision for trade feasts. In 1651 the Chester Company of Barbers, Surgeons, Wax and Tallow Chandlers, a remarkably comprehensive organization, paid for sac, beer, and tobacco at the Talbot on St. Luke's Day, October 18th, on the occasion of a dinner given to the company by one Richard Walker, and similar expenditure was common among both London and provincial companies. The court books of the Skinners Company of London show that in preparation for their annual election dinner in 1694 the cook appeared before the court and produced a bill of fare which, with some alterations, was agreed to. The butler then appeared and undertook to provide knives, salt, pepper pots, glasses, sauces, etc., and everything needful for seven pounds, and if he gives content then to have eight pounds he provides all things, but pipes, tobacco, candles, and beer, which apparently fell to the lot of some mother caterer. But so early as 1655 there is a sign of change of custom, a change that is in the direction of restricting and limiting the hitherto unbounded freedom granted to the use of tobacco. The London Society of Apothecaries, on August 15, 1655, held a meeting for the election of a master and an upper warden, and from the minutes of this meeting we learned that by general consent it was forbidden, henceforward, to smoke in the courtroom while dining or sitting under penalty of half a crown. The more fashionable folk of the Restoration Era and later began to leave off if not to disdain the smoking habit. Up to about 1700 smoking had been permitted in the public rooms at Bath, but when Nash then took charge tobacco was banished. Public, or at least fashionable taste, had begun to change and Nash correctly interpreted and led it. Sorbière, who has been quoted in the previous chapter, remarked in 1663 that people of quality did not use tobacco so much as others, and towards the end of the century and in Queen Anne's time the tendency was for tobacco to go out of fashion. This did not much affect its general use, but the tendency, with exceptions no doubt, was to restrict the use of tobacco to the clergy, to country squires, to merchants and tradesmen, and to the humbler ranks of society, to limit it in short to the middle and lower classes of the social commonwealth as then organized. In the extraordinary record of an entity which Addison printed as the diary of a citizen in the spectator of March 4th, 1712, the devotion of the worthy retired tradesmen to tobacco is emphasized. This is the kind of thing. Monday, hours 10, 11, and 12 smoked three pipes of Virginia. One o'clock in the afternoon chide Ralph for mislaying my tobacco box. Wednesday, from one to two, smoked a pipe and a half. Friday, from four to six. Went to the coffee house, met Mr. Nisby there, smoked several pipes. There was indeed no diminution of tobacco smoke in the coffee houses. A visitor from abroad, Mr. Muralt, a Swiss gentleman, writing about 1696, said that character could be well studied at the coffee houses. He was probably not a smoker himself, for he goes on to say that in other respects the coffee houses are loathsome, full of smoke, like a guard room, and as much crowded. He further observed that it was common to see the clergy of London in coffee houses and even in taverns with pipes in their mouths. A native witness of about the same date, Ned Ward, writes sneeringly in his London Spy, 1699, of the interior of the coffee house. He saw some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jingling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco like a Dutch scoot or a boat's one's cabin. We, each of us, stuck in our mouths a pipe of sotweed and now began to look about us. Ward's contemporary, Tom Brown, took a different tone. He wrote of tobacco, coal, and the Protestant religion, the three great blessings of life, as strange a jumble as one could wish for. Even children seem to have smoked sometimes in the coffee houses. Ralph Thorsby, the lead's antiquary, tells a strange story. He declares that one evening which he spent with his brother at Garroway's coffee house, February 20th, 1702, he was surprised to see his brother's sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco and smoke it as odd farrenly as a man of three score. After that, a second and a third pipe without the least concern as it is said to have done above a year ago. A child of two years of age smoking three pipes in succession is a picture a little difficult to accept as true. As this is the only reference to tobacco in the whole of his diary, it is not likely that Thorsby was himself a smoker. At the coffee house entrance was the bar presided over by the predecessors of the modern barmaids, grumbled at in a spectator as idols, who there received homage from their admirers and who paid more attention to customers who flirted with them than to more sober-minded visitors. They are described by Tom Brown as a charming phyllis or two who invited you by their amorous glances into their smoky territories. Admission cost little. There you might see grave wits who spending farthings for sit, smoke, and warm themselves an hour. The illusions in the spectator to smoking in the coffee houses are frequent. Sometimes, says Addison, in his title character in the first number of the paper, sometimes I smoke a pipe at child's and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the postman, overhear the conversation of every table in the room. And here is a vignette of coffee house life in 1714 from number 568 of the spectator. I was yesterday in a coffee house not far from the Royal Exchange, where I observed three persons in close conference over a pipe of tobacco, upon which, having filled one for my own use, I lighted it at the little wax candle that stood before them, and after having thrown in two or three whiffs amongst them, sat down and made one of the company. I need not tell my reader that lighting a man's pipe at the same candle is looked upon among brother smokers as an overture to conversation and friendship. From the very beginning, smoking has induced and fostered a spirit of comradeship. Sir Roger D. Carverly, as a typical country squire, was naturally a smoker. He presented his friend the spectator, the silent gentleman, with the tobacco stopper made by Will Wimble, telling him that Will had been busy all the early part of the winter in turning great quantities of them, and had made a present of one to every gentleman in the county who had good principles and smoked. When Sir Roger was driving in a hackney-coach, he called upon the coachman to stop, and when the man came to the window, asked him if he smoked. While Sir Roger's companion was wondering what this would end in, the night bid his jihoot who, stop by the way at any good tobacconists and take in a roll of their best Virginia. And when he visited Squires near Grey Innsgate, his first act was to call for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a dish of coffee, a newspaper, and a wax candle, and all the boys in the coffee-room ran to serve him. The wax candle was, of course, a convenience in matchless days for pipelighting. The paper of tobacco was the equivalent of what is now vulgarly called a screw of tobacco. The practice of selling tobacco in small paper packets was common, and moralists naturally had something to say about the fate of an author's work, when the leaves of his books found their ultimate use as wrappers for the weed. For as no mortal author, says Addison, in the ordinary fate and vicissitude of things, knows to what use his works may, some time or other, be applied, a man may often meet with very celebrated names in a paper of tobacco. I have lighted my pipe more than once with the writings of a prelet. Addison and Steele smoked, and so did Pryor, who seems to have had a weakness at times for low company. After spending an evening with Oxford bowling-broke, Pope and Swift, it is recorded that he would go and smoke a pipe and drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife in Longacre, before he went to bed. Some of Pryor's poems, as Thackeray costically remarks, smack not a little of the conversation of his Longacre friends. Pope for a while attended the symposium at Button's Coffee House, where Addison was the center of the coterie. He described himself as sitting with them till two in the morning over punch and burgundy amid the fumes of tobacco, but such a way of life did not suit his sickly constitution, and he soon withdrew. It is not likely that he smoked. The attractions and the atmosphere of provincial coffee houses were much the same as those of the London resorts. A German gentleman who visited Cambridge in July and August 1710 remarked that in the Greek's Coffee House, in that town, in the morning and after three o'clock in the afternoon, you could meet the chief professors and doctors who read the papers over a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco. One of the learned doctors took the German visitor to the weekly meeting of a music club in one of the colleges. Here were assembled bachelor's, master's, and doctors of music of the university, no professionals were employed, who performed vocal and instrumental music to their mutual gratification, though apparently not to the satisfaction of the visitor, who records his opinion that the music was very poor. It lasted, he says, till eleven p.m. There was besides smoking and drinking of wine, though we did not do much of either. At eleven the reckoning was called for and each person paid two shillings. There was clearly no prejudice against smoking at Cambridge. Abraham de la Prime notes in his diary for the year 1694 that when it was rumored in May of that year that a certain house opposite one of the colleges was haunted, strange noises being heard in it, several scholars of the college said, come, fetch us a good picture of ale and tobacco and pipes, and we'll sit up and see this spirit. The ale was duly provided, the pipes were lit, and the courageous smoker spent the night in the house sitting, singing, and drinking there till morning, but alas, they neither saw nor heard anything. Smoking was still popular also at Oxford. A Danvers, in her academia, or the humours of Oxford, 1691, speaks indeed of undergraduates who when they could not get tobacco did much as the parson of Thornton is reputed to have done, as already related in Chapter 2, that is, they condescended to smoke fragments of mats. With this may be compared the Macaronic lines, Tobacco, in Queen Anne's time, still maintained its hold over large classes of the people, and was still dominant in most places of public resort, but there were signs of change in various directions, as we have seen, and smoking had to a large extent cease to be fashionable. Peeps has very few illusions to tobacco. Evelyn, fewer still. There is little evidence as to whether or not the gallants of the restoration court smoked, but considering the phoppery of their attire and manners, it seems almost certain that tobacco was not in favor among them. The bow, with their full wigs, they carried combs of ivory or tortoise shell in their pockets, with which they publicly combed their flowing locks, their dandy canes and scented laced handkerchiefs were not the men to enjoy the flavor of tobacco in a pipe. They were still tobacco worshipers, but they did not smoke. The Indian weed retained its empire over the men and women of fashion by changing its form. The bow were the devotees of snuff. The deftly handled pinch pleasantly tindalated their nerves, and the dexterous use of the snuff-box, moreover, could also serve the purposes of vanity by displaying the beautiful whiteness of the hand and the splendor of the rings upon the fingers. The curled darlings of the late 17th century, and the pretty fellows of Queen Anne's time, did not forswear tobacco, but they abjured smoking. Snuff-taking was universal in the fashionable world among both men and women, and the development of this habit made smoking unfashionable. End of chapter 6 Recording by Roger Maline Social History of Smoking This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mary Rodie. The Social History of Smoking by G. L. Apperson, I.S.O. Chapter 7 Smoking Unfashionable Early Georgian Days Lord Fopling smokes not, for his teeth afraid. Sir Todry smokes not, for he wears barcade. Isaac Hawkins Brown, Circa 1740 With the reign of Queen Anne, tobacco had entered on a period destined to be of long duration when smoking was to a very large extent under a social ban. Pipe smoking was unfashionable, that is to say, was not practiced by men of fashion, and was for the most part regarded as low or provincial, from the time named until well into the reign of Queen Victoria. The social taboo was by no means universal. Some of the exceptions will be noted in these pages, but speaking broadly, the general almost universal smoking of tobacco, which had been characteristic of the earlier decades of the 17th century, did not again prevail until within living memory. Throughout the 18th century, the use of tobacco for smoking was largely confined to the middle and humbler classes of society. To smoke was characteristic of the sit, of the country squire, of the clergy, especially of the country Parsons, and of those of lower social status. But at the same time, it must be borne in mind that then, as since, the dictates of fashion and the conventions of society were little regarded by many artists and men of letters. In the preceding chapter, I quoted from Addison's diary of a retired tradesman in the spectator of 1712. The periodical publications of a generation or so later paid the great essayist the flattery of imitation in this respect as in others. In the connoisseur of George Coleman and Bunnell Thornton, for instance, there is, in 1754, the description of a citizen's Sunday. The good man, having sent his family to church in the morning, goes off himself to mother redcaps, a favorite tavern, suburban in those days, or house of call for city tradesmen. There he smokes half a pipe and drinks a pint of ale. In the evening at another tavern he smokes a pipe and drinks two pints of cider. Winding up the inane day at his club, where he smokes three pipes before coming home at twelve, to go to bed and sleep soundly. The weekend habit was strong among London tradesmen in those days. Another connoisseur paper of 1754 refers to the citizen's country boxes as dusty retreats because they were always built in close contiguity to the highway, so that the inhabitants could watch the traffic in the absence of anything more sensible to do, where the want of London smoke is supplied by the smoke of Virginia tobacco, and where our chief citizens are accustomed to pass the end and the beginning of every week. In the following year there is a description of a visit to Vauxhall by a worthy citizen with his wife and two daughters. After supper the poor man sadly laments that he cannot have his pipe, because his wife, with social ambitions, deems that it is un-genteel to smoke where any ladies are in company. Again, in the connoisseur's rival, the world, founded and conducted by Edward Moore, there is a letter in the number dated February 19, 1756, from a citizen who says, I have the honour to be a member of a certain club in this city where it is a standing order that the paper called the world be constantly brought upon the table with clean glasses, pipes and tobacco every Thursday after dinner. The country gentlemen of the time followed the hounds and enjoyed rural sports of all kinds, drank ale, and smoked tobacco. They had their smoking rooms, too. Walter Gale, schoolmaster at Mayfield, Cessex, noted in his journal under date March 26, 1751, I went to Mr. Baker's for the list of scholars and found him alone in the smoking room. He ordered a pint of mild beer for me, an extraordinary thing. Gale himself was a regular smoker, and too fond of pints of ale. Fielding has immortalised the squire of the mid-18th century in his picture of that sporting, roaring, swearing, drinking, smoking, affectionate, irascible, blundering, altogether extraordinary owner of broad acres, Squire Western. We may shrewdly suspect that the portrait of Western is somewhat over-coloured and cannot fairly be taken as typical, but there is sufficient evidence to show that in some respects at least, in his enthusiasm for sport, and love of ale and tobacco, Western is representative of the country squires of his day. In a world of 1755, there is a description of a noisy, hardy, drinking, devil-make-hair country gentleman in which it is said, he makes no scruple to take his pipe and pot at an ale-house with the very dregs of the people. In a connoisseur of 1754, a fine gentleman from London, making a visit in a country-house, is taking his breakfast with the ladies in the afternoon when they had their tea, for, says he, I should infallibly have perished had I stayed in the hall amidst the jargon of toasts and the fumes of tobacco. When Horace Walpole was staying with his father at his Norfolk country-seat, Haughton, in September 1737, Gray wrote to him from Cambridge, You are in a confusion of wine and roaring and hunting and tobacco, and heaven be praised, you too can pretty well bear it. But Gray had no objection to tobacco. He lived at Cambridge, and the dons and residents there, as at Oxford, not to speak of the undergraduates, were as partial to their pipes as the men who went out from among them to become country-parsons and to share the country-squires liking for tobacco. Gray wrote to Wharton from Cambridge in April 1749, saying, Time will settle my conscience, time will reconcile me to this languid companion, and we shall smoke, we shall tipple, we shall doze together, a striking picture of university life in the sleepy days of the eighteenth century. Gray's testimony by no means stands alone. In November 1730, Roger North wrote to his son Montague, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, saying, I would loathe you should confirm the scandal charged upon the universities of learning, chiefly to smoke and to drink. At Oxford in early Georgian days, a profound calm, so far a study was concerned, appears to have prevailed. Little work was done, but much tobacco was smoked. In 1733, a satire was published, violently attacking the fellows of various colleges. According to this satirist, the occupation of the Magdalen fellow was to drink, look big, smoke much, think little, curse the free-born wig, from which it may not unreasonably be surmised that the author was a Tory. And however little enthusiasm there may have been at Oxford in those days for learning and study, there was plenty of life in political animosities. Another witness to the Don's love of tobacco is Thomas Wharton. In his Progress of Discontent, written in 1746, he plaintively sang, Return ye days when endless pleasure I found in reading or in leisure, when calm around the common room I puffed my daily pipes perfume, rode for a stomach and inspected, at annual bottlings, cork selected, and dined, untaxed, untroubled, under the portrait of our pious founder. Wharton and another Oxford smoker of some distinction, the Reverend William Crowe, who was public orator from 1784 to 1829, are both said to have been, like prior, rather fond of frequenting the company of persons of humble rank and little education, with whom they would drink their ale and smoke their pipes. Mr. A. D. Godley, in his Oxford in the 18th century, gives an excellent English version of the Latin original of one of the Christ Church Carmina Quadragismalia, which affords much the same picture of the daily life of an Oxford Fellow in the days when George I was king. This good man lives strictly by rule, and each returning day nears words a hair-breath from the same old way, always within the memory of men, he's risen at eight and gone to bed at ten. The same old cat his college room partakes, the same old scout his bed each morning makes. On mutton-roast he daily dines in state, whole flocks have perished to supply his plate, takes just one turn to catch the westering sun, then reads the paper as he's always done. Soon cracks in common room the same old jokes, drinking three glasses ere three pipes he smokes, and what he did while Charles our throne did fill, neath George's air you'll find him doing still. It seems to have been taken for granted that country parson smoked. Smoking was universal among their male parishioners, from the squire to the labourer, when he could afford it, so that it was only natural that the parson, with little to do, and in those days not too much inclination to do it, should be as fond of his pipe as the rest of the world around him. In a world of seventeen fifty-six, there is an account of a country gentleman entertaining one evening the vicar of the parish, and the host as a matter of course proceeds to order a bottle of wine with pipes and tobacco to be placed on the table. The vicar forked with, filled his pipe, and drank very cordially to my friend, his host. One cannot doubt that Lawrence Stern, that most remarkable of country parson's, smoked. His, my uncle Toby, is among the immortals, and Toby, without his pipe, is unimaginable. The most famous of country clergymen of the early Georgian period is, of course, Fielding's lovable and immortal parson Adams. Throughout Joseph Andrews, the parson smokes at every opportunity. At his first appearance on the scene, in the in-kitchen, he calls for a pipe of tobacco before taking his place at the fireside. The next morning, when he fails to obtain a desired loan from the landlord, Adams, extremely dejected at his disappointment, immediately applies to his pipe, his constant friend and comfort in his affliction, and leans over the rails of the gallery overlooking the in-yard, devoting himself to meditation, assisted by the inspiring fumes of tobacco. Later on, in the parlor of the country justice of the peace, who condemned his prisoners before he had taken the depositions of the witnesses against them, and who, by the way, also lit his pipe while his clerk performed this necessary duty, Adams, when his character has been cleared, sits down with the company and takes a cheerful glass, and applies himself vigorously to smoking. A few hours later, when the parson, Fanny, and their guide are driven by a storm of rain to take shelter in a wayside ale-house, Adams immediately procured himself a good fire, a toast and ale, and a pipe, and began to smoke with great content, utterly forgetting everything that had happened. In the same inn, after Mrs. Slipslopp has appeared and disappeared, Adams smokes three pipes and takes a comfortable nap in a great chair, so leaving the lovers, Joseph and Fanny, to enjoy a delightful time together. At another inn, a country squirress discovered smoking his pipe by the door, and the parson promptly joins him. Again he smokes before he goes to bed, and before he breakfasts the next morning. And when he goes into the inn garden, with the host who is willing to trust him, both host and parson light their pipes before beginning to gossip. Farther on, when the hospitable Mr. Wilson takes the weary wayfarers in, parson Adams loses no time in filling himself with ale, as Fielding puts it, and lighting his pipe. The menfolk, Wilson, Adams, and Joseph, have to spend the night seated round the fire, but apparently Adams is the only one who seeks the solace of tobacco. It is significant that Wilson, in telling the story of his dissipated early life, classes smoking with singing, hollowing, wrangling, drinking, toasting, and other diversions of jolly companions. There is no mention of parson trellibur's pipe, but that pigbreeder and lover can hardly have been a non-smoker. Both the other clerical characters who appear in the book, the Roman Catholic priest who makes an equivocal appearance in the eighth chapter of the third book, and parson Barnabas, who thinks that his own sermons are at least equal to Tillotson's, smoke their pipes. The other smokers, in Joseph Andrews, are the surgeon and the excise man, who early in the story, are found sitting in the inn kitchen with parson Barnabas, smoking their pipes over some cider-rend. The mysterious cup being a mixture of cider and something spiritual. And Joseph's father, old Gaffer Andrews, who appears at the end of the story, and complains bitterly that he wants his pipe, not having had a whiff that morning. Fielding himself smoked his pipe. When his play, The Wedding Day, was produced by Garrick in 1743, various suggestions were made to the author as to the excision of certain passages and the modifications of one of the scenes. Garrick pressed for certain omissions, but— No, damn them! said Fielding. If the scene is not a good one, let them find that out. And then, according to Murphy, he retired to the green room, where, during the progress of the play, he smoked his pipe and drank champagne. Presently he heard the sound of hissing, and when Garrick came in and explained that the audience had hissed the scene he had wished to have modified, all Fielding said was— Oh, damn them! they have found it out, have they? Simon Frazier, Lord Leavitt, the crafty old Jacobite, who took part in the rising of 1745, and who was executed on Tower Hill in 1747, was a smoker. The pipe which he was reported to have smoked on the evening before his execution, together with his snuff-box and a canvas tobacco bag, were for many years in the possession of the Society of Codgers, the famous debating society of Fleet Street. It has sometimes been said that Swift smoked, but this is a mistake. He had a fancy for taking tobacco in a slightly different way from the fashionable mode of taking snuff. He told Stella that he had left off snuff altogether, and then, in the very next sentence, remarked that he had a noble role of tobacco for grading, very good. And in a later letter to Stella, May 24, 1711, he asked if she still snuffed, and went on to say, in sentences that seem to contradict one another, I have left it off, and when anybody offers me their box, I take about a tenth part of what I used to do, then just smell to it, and privately fling the rest away. I keep my tobacco still, as you say, but even much less of that than formerly, only mornings and evenings, and very seldom in the day. One might infer from this that he smoked, but this Swift never did. His practice was to snuff up cut and dried tobacco, which was sometimes just colored with Spanish snuff. This he did all his life, but as the mixture he took was not technically snuff, he never owned that he took snuff. Another cleric of the period, well known to fame, who took snuff but also loved his pipe, was Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire, from 1697 to 1735. He not only smoked his pipe, but sang its praises. In these raw mornings, when I'm freezing ripe, what can compare with the tobacco pipe? Primed, cocked, and torched, twit better heat a man than ten bath faggots or scotch warming pan. Samuel's greater son, John Wesley, did not share the parental love of a pipe. He spoke of the use of tobacco as an uncleanly and unwholesome self-indulgence, and described snuffing as a silly, nasty, dirty custom. The London clergy seemed to have smoked at one time as a matter of course at their gatherings at Scion College, their headquarters. An entry in the records, under date February 14, 1682, relating to a court meeting, runs, paid Maddox the messenger for attending and pipes six pence. How long pipes continued to be concomitants of the meetings of the college's general court, I cannot say, but smoking and the annual dinners were long associated. At the anniversary feast in 1743, there were two tables to provide for the total number of guests being about thirty, and two courses to each. The cost of the food, as Cannon Pierce tells us in his excellent and entertaining book on the college and its library, was nineteen pound fifteen shilling, or rather more than thirteen shillings ahead. The bill for wines and tobacco amounted to five guineas, or about three shilling six pence ahead. And for this modest sum, the thirty convives enjoyed eleven gallons of red aporto, one a white Lisbon, and three of Mountain, to the accompaniment of two pounds of tobacco, at three shilling four pence, the pound, smoked in half a gross of pipes, at one shilling. The examples and illustrations which have been given so far in this chapter relate to tradesmen and merchants, country gentlemen, and the clergy. Other professional men smoked. We read in Fielding's Amelia, of a doctor who in the evening smoked his pillow pipe, as the phrase is, and among the rest of the people of equal or lower social standing, smoking was as generally practiced as in the preceding century. Handel, I may note, enjoyed his pipe. Dr. Burnie, when a schoolboy at Chester, was extremely curious to see so extraordinary a man, so when Handel went through that city in seventeen forty-one, on his way to Ireland, young Burnie watched him narrowly as long as he remained in Chester, and, among other things, had the felicity of seeing the great man, smoke a pipe over a dish of coffee at the exchange coffee-house, which was under the old town hall that stood opposite the present king's school, and in front of the present town hall. Gonzales, in his voyage to Great Britain, in seventeen thirty-one, says that the use of tobacco was very universal and, indeed, not improper for so moist a climate. He tells us that though the taverns were very numerous, yet the ale houses were much more so. These ale houses were visited by the inferior tradesmen, mechanics, journeymen, porters, coachmen, carmen, servants, and others whose pockets were not equal to the price of a glass of wine, which, apparently, was the most usual thing to call for at a tavern, properly so called. In the ale house, men of the various classes and occupations enumerated, says the traveler, would, sit promiscuously in common dirty rooms with large fires and clouds of tobacco, where one that is not used to them can scarce breathe or see. The antiquary hern has left on record an account of a curious smoking match held at Oxford in 1723. It began at two o'clock in the afternoon, on September four, on a scaffold specially erected for the purpose over against the theatre in Oxford, just at Finmore's, an ale house. The conditions were that any one, man or woman, who could smoke out three ounces of tobacco first, without drinking or going off the stage, should have twelve shelling's. Many tried, continues hern, and was thought that a journeyman tailor of St. Peter's in the East would have been victor, he smoking faster than and being many pipes before the rest. But at last he was so sick that was thought he would have died, and an old man that had been a soldier and smoked gently came off conqueror, smoking the three ounces quite out, and he told one, from whom I had it, that after it he smoked four or five pipes the same evening. The old soldier was a well-seasoned veteran. Another foreign visitor to England, the Abbey Leblanc, who was over here about 1730, found English customs rather trying. Even a table, he says, where they serve desserts, they do but show them, and presently take away everything, even to the tablecloth. By this the English, whom politeness does not permit to tell the ladies their company is troublesome, give them notice to retire. The table is immediately covered with mugs, bottles, and glasses, and often with pipes of tobacco. All things thus disposed, the ceremony of toasts, begins. The frowns and demonstrances of quarterly and monthly meetings of friends had not succeeded in putting the Quakers' pipes out. In a list of sea stores put on board, a vessel called by an unquaker-like name of the Charming Polly, which brought a party of friends across the Atlantic from Philadelphia in 1756, we find, in Samuel Fathergill's new chest, tobacco, a hamper, a barrel, a box of pipes. The Providence Samuel was well found for a long voyage. The non-smokers were the men of fashion and those who followed them in preferring the snuff-box to the pipe. Sometimes, apparently, they chewed. A world of 1754 pokes fun at the pretty young men who take pains to appear manly, but alas the methods they pursue, like most mistaken applications, rather aggravate the calamity. Their drinking and raking only makes them look like old maids. Their swearing is almost as shocking as it would be in the other sex. Their chewing tobacco not only offends, but makes us apprehensive at the same time that the poor things will be sick, as they certainly well deserve to be. The chew might be manly, but it will be observed that smoking is not mentioned. No reputation for manliness could be achieved by even the affectation of a pipe. Similarly, in Bramston's Man of Taste, various fashionable tastes are described, but there is no mention of tobacco. In Townley's well-known two-act farce, High Life Below Stairs, 1759, the servants take their masters and mistresses' titles, and ape their ways. The man-servants, the dukes, and Sir Harrys, offer one another snuff. "'Taste this snuff,' Sir Harry,' says the duke. "'Tis good, wrappy,' replies Sir Henry. "'Write Strasburg, I assure you, and of my own importing,' says the knowing ducal valet. "'The city people adulterated so confoundedly,' he continues, "'that I always import my own snuff.' And in similar vain he goes on in imitation of his master, the genuine duke. These servants copy the talk and style with a difference of their employers, but smoking is never mentioned. The real dukes and Sir Harrys took snuff with the grace, but they did not do anything so low as to smoke, and their man-servants faithfully aped their preferences and their aversions. Negative evidence of this kind is abundant, and positive statements of the aversion of the bull from smoking are not lacking. Doddsley's collection contains a satirical poem called A Pipe of Tobacco, which was written in imitation of six different poets. The author was Isaac Hawkins Brown, and the poets imitated were the Laureate Sipper, Phillips, Thompson, Young, Pope, and Swift. The first imitation is called A New Year's Ode, and contains three recitatives, three heirs, and a chorus. One of the heirs will suffice as a sample. Happy mortal, he who knows pleasure which a pipe bestows, curling eddies climb the room, wafting round a mild perfume. Number two, which was intended as a burlesque of Phillips' splendid shilling, is really pretty and must be given entire. It reveals unsuspected beauties in the simple church warden or yard of clay. Little tube of mighty power, charmer of an idle hour, object of my warm desire, lip of wax, and eye of fire, and thy snowy taper waste, with my finger gently bracked, and thy pretty swelling crest with my little stopper pressed, and the sweetest bliss of blisses, breathing from thy balmy kisses. Happy thrice, and thrice again, happiest he of happy men, who, when again the night returns, when again the taper burns, when again the cricket's gay, little cricket full of play, can afford his tube to feed with the fragrant Indian weed. Pleasure for a nose divine, incense of the god of wine. Happy thrice, and thrice again, happiest he of happy men. Imitations three and five praise the leaf in less happy strains, though number five has a line worth noting for our purpose, in which tobacco is spoken of as, by ladies hated, hated by the bow. The sixth sinks to ribaldry. Number four contains evidence of the distaste for smoking among the bow in the lines. Coxcombs prefer the tickling sting of snuff, yet all their claim to wisdom is a puff. Lord Poplin smokes not, for his teeth afraid. Sir Todry smokes not, for he wears brocade. Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon. They love no smoke, except the smoke of town. But courtiers hate the puffing tube no matter, strange if they love the breath that cannot flatter. Yet crowds remain who still its worth proclaim, while some for pleasure smoke, and some for fame. The satirist wrote truly that after all the fashionable abstainers had been deducted, crowds remained, who smoked as heartily as their predecessors of a century earlier. The populace was still on the side of tobacco. This was well shown in 1732, when Sir Robert Walpole proposed special excise duties on tobacco, and brought a bill into parliament which would have given his excise men powers of inquisition which were much resented by the people generally. The controversy produced a host of squibs and caricatures, most of which were directed against the measure. The bill was defeated in 1733, and great and general were the rejoicings. When the news reached Derby on April 19 in that year, the dealers in tobacco caused all the bells in the Derby churches to be rung, and we may be sure that this rather unusual performance was highly popular. The withdrawal of the odious duty was further celebrated by caricatures and poetical chants of triumph. One of the leading opponents of the bill had been a well-known puffing tobaccoist named Bradley, who was accustomed to describe his wares as the best in Christendom. And when the bill was defeated, Bradley's portrait was published for popular circulation above these lines. Behold the man who, when a gloomy band of vile excisement threatened all the land, helped to deliver from their harpy gripe the cheerful bottle and the social pipe. O rare, Ben Bradley, may for this the bowl, still unexcised, rejoice thy honest soul. May still the best in Christendom for this cleave to thy stopper, and complete thy bliss. This print is now chiefly of interest, because the plate was adorned with a tiny etching by Hogarth, in which appeared the figures of the British Lion and Britannia, both with pipes in their mouths, Britannia being seated on a cask of tobacco. Hogarth was fond of introducing the pipe into his plates. In the tailpiece to his works, which he prepared a few months before his death, and which he called the bathos, or manner of sinking and sublime paintings, the end of everything is represented. Time himself, supported against a broken column, is expiring, his scythe falling from his grasp, and a long clay pipe breaking into, as it falls from his lips. This was issued in 1764, Hogarth's last published work. In the plate which shows the execution of Thomas Idle in the industry and idleness series, Hogarth depicts the little hangman smoking a short pipe, as he sits on the top of the gallows, waiting for his victim. The familiar plate of a modern midnight conversation shows a parson in surplice and wig smoking like a furnace, while he ladles punch from a bowl, probably meant for a portrait of the notorious orator Henley. Most of the other guests are also shown smoking long clay pipes. Hogarth's subscription ticket for the print of Sigismunda was Time Smoking a Picture, 1761. It represents an old man sitting on a fragment of statuary and smoking a long pipe against a picture of a landscape which stands upon an easel before him. Below on his left is a large jar labeled varnish. The figure of Time is nude and has large wings. Volumes of smoke are pouring against the surface of the picture from both his mouth and the bowl of his long clay pipe. In the stagecoach, or country in yard, is shown an old woman smoking a pipe in the basket of the coach. The plate of the distressed poet, 1736, shows four books and three tobacco pipes on a shelf. In the second of the election series, the Canvassing for Votes, 1755, a barber and a cobbler seated at the table in the right-hand corner are both smoking long pipes. Apparently they are discussing the taking of Portobello by Admiral Vernon in 1739 with only six ships. For the barber is illustrating his talk by pointing with his twisted pipe stem to six fragments which he has broken from the stem and arranged on the table in the shape of a crescent. In the frontispiece, which Hogarth drew in 1762 for Garrick's farce of the farmer's return from London, the worthy farmer, seated in his great chair, holds out a large mug in one hand to be filled with ale while the other supports his long pipe, which he is smoking with evident enjoyment. Hogarth himself was a confirmed pipe-lover. When he and Thornhill and their three companions set out from Gravesend for the final stage up the river of their famous Five Days Peregrination, we are told that they hired a boat with clean straw and laid in a bottle of wine, pipes, tobacco, and light, and so came merrily up the river. The armchair in which Hogarth was want to sit and smoke is still preserved in his house at Chiswick, which has been bought and preserved as a memorial of the moralist painter, and in the garden of the house may still be seen the remains of the mulberry tree, under which Mr. Austen Dobb suggests that Hogarth and Fielding may have sat and smoked their pipes together in the days when George was king. Smoking on fashionable continued later Georgian days. Says the pipe to the snuff box, I can't understand what the ladies and gentlemen see in your face, that you are in fashion all over the land, and I am so much fallen into disgrace. William Cowper, from a letter to the Reverend John Newton, May 28, 1782. Smoking has gone out, said Johnson in Talk at St. Andrews one day in 1773. To be sure, he continued, it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us, yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out. Johnson did not trouble himself to think of how much the vagaries of fashion account for stranger vicissitudes in manners and customs than the rise and fall of the smoking habit. Nor did he probably foresee how slowly but surely the taste for smoking, even in the circles most influenced by fashion, would revive. Boswell tells us that although the sage himself never smoked, yet he had a high opinion of the practice as a sedative influence. And Hawkins heard him say on one occasion that insanity had grown more frequent since smoking had gone out of fashion, which shows that even Johnson could fall a victim to the post-Hawk prompter-Hawk fallacy. More than one writer of recent days has absurdly misrepresented Johnson as a smoker. The author of a book on tobacco, published a few years ago, wrote, Dr. Johnson smoked like a furnace, a grotesquely untrue statement, and all his friends, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, were his companions in tobacco worship. Reynolds, we know, when they talked of their Raphaels, Courageous and stuff, he shifted his trumpet and only took snuff. Johnson and all his company took snuff as everyone in the fashionable world and a great many others outside that charmed circle did. But Johnson did not smoke, and I doubt whether any of the others did. There is ample evidence, apart from Johnson's dictum, that in the latter part of the eighteenth century smoking had gone out. In Mrs. Clemenson's passages from the diaries of Mrs. Libby Powis, we hear of a bundle of papers at Hardwick House, near Whittchurch-Oxon, which bears the unvarnished title, Dick's Debt. This dick was a Captain Richard Powis, who had a commission in the guards and died at the early age of twenty-six in the year seventeen sixty-eight. This list of debts, it appears, gives the most complete catalog of the expenses of a dandy of the Court of George II, consisting chiefly of swords, buckles, lace, valencians, and point de spawn, gold and amber-headed canes, tavern bills, and chair hire. But in all the ample detail of Captain Powis's list of extravagances, there is nothing directly or indirectly related to smoking. The bows of the time did not smoke. In the whole sixteen volumes of Walpole's correspondence, as so admirably edited by Mrs. Toynbee, there is scarcely a mention of tobacco, and the same may be said of other collections of letters of the same period, the Selwyn letters, the Delaney's correspondence, and so on. Neither Walpole, nor any member of the world in which he lived, would appear to have smoked. In Miss Bernie's Evelina, seventeen seventy-eight, from the beginning to the end of the book there is no mention whatever of tobacco or of smoking. Apparently the vulgar branktons were not vulgar enough to smoke. Such use of tobacco was considered low and was confined to the classes of society indicated in the preceding chapter. One of the characters in Macklin's Love Sea La Mode, seventeen sixty, is described as dull, dull as an alderman, after six pounds of turtle, four bottles of port, and twelve pipes of tobacco. A satirical print by Rowlinson contains a man of fashion's journal dated May one, eighteen oh two. The man of fashion rides and drinks, goes to the play, gambles and bets, but his journal contains no reference to smoking. Rowlinson himself smoked and so did his brother caricaturist, Gilray. Angelo says that they would sometimes meet at such resorts of the low as the bell, the coal hole, or the coach and horses, and would enter into the common chat of the room, smoke and drink together, and then, sometimes early, sometimes late, shake hands at the door, look up at the stars, say it is a pretty night, and depart, one for the Adelphi, the other to St. James Street, each to his bachelor's bed. But outside the fashionable world pipes were still in full blast, and in many places of resort the atmosphere was as be clouded with tobacco smoke as in earlier days. Grossly, in his tour to London, 1765, says that there were regular clubs which were held in coffee houses and taverns at fixed days and hours when wine, beer, tea, pipes and tobacco were helped to amuse the company. Angelo gives some lively pictures of scenes of this kind in the London of about 1780. The Turks head, in Gerard Street, was the meeting place for a knot of worthies, principally sons of St. Luke, or the children of Thespis, and mostly votaries of Bacchus, as the old fencing master, who loved a little fine writing, describes them, and here they sat, he says, taking their punch and smoking, the prevailing custom of the time. About the same time, circa 1790, an evening resort for purposes mostly vicious was the famous dog and duck in St. George's Fields. The long room, says Angelo, if I may depend on my memory, was on the ground floor, and all the benches were filled with motley groups, eating, drinking and smoking. Angelo also mentions the picnic society, a celebrated resort of fashion at the beginning of the nineteenth century, where the odor of tobacco never penetrated. It afforded, he says, in his fine way, a sort of anti-pedal contrast to those smoking tavern clubs of the old city of Trinobantes. The same writer speaks of a certain Montseur Léves, whom he met in Paris in 1772, who had been one of the first dancers at the Italian opera house and Maître de Ballet at Drury Lane Theatre. This gentleman was addicted to self-indulgence, loved good eating, and good and ample drinking, and, moreover, kept late hours, all in glaze, smoked his pipe and drank oceans of punch. Collarage, in the biographica literaria, gives an amusing account of his own experience of an attempt to smoke in company with a party of tradesmen. In 1795 he was travelling about the country, endeavouring to secure subscriptions to the periodical publication he had started called The Watchman. At Birmingham one day he dined with a worthy tradesman, who, after dinner, improtuned him to smoke a pipe with him and two or three other Illuminati of the same rank. The remainder of the moving story must be told in Collarage's own words. I objected, he says, both because I was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and then it was herb-tobacco, mixed with orinucco. On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing, too, that it was of a yellow colour, not forgetting the lamentable difficulty I have always experienced in saying no, and in abstaining from what the people about me were doing, I took half a pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. I was soon, however, compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my eyes, which, as I had drunk but a single glass of ale, must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming myself recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement, but the walk and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and I had scarcely entered the minister's drawing-room, and I opened a small packet of letters, which he had received from Bristol for me, air I sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform him of the confused state of my feelings and of the occasion. For here and thus I lay my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead, while one after the other there dropped in the different gentlemen who had been invited to meet and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment, one of the gentlemen began the conversation with, Have you seen a paper today, Mr. Colleridge? Sir, I replied, rubbing my eyes. I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest. This remark so ludicrously in opposite to, or rather incongruous with, the purpose for which I was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all met, produced an involuntary and general burst of laughter, and seldom indeed have I passed so many delightful hours as I enjoyed in that room from the moment of that laugh till an early hour the next morning. All's well that ends well, but one cannot help wondering what kind of tobacco it was that the Birmingham tradesmen used, a half-pipe full of which had such a deadly effect, but perhaps the effect was due to the salt not to the tobacco. In the year after that which witnessed Colleridge's adventure, i.e., in 1796, a tobacco box with a history was the subject of a legal decision. This box, made from common horn and small enough to be carried in the pocket, was bought for four pence by an overseer of the poor in the time of Queen Anne, and was presented by him in 1713 to the Society of Past Overseers of the Parish of St. Margaret Westminster. In 1720 the Society, in memory of the donor, ornamented the lid with a silver rim, and at intervals thereafter additions were made to an extraordinary extent to the box and its casings. Hogarth engraved within the lid in 1746 a bust of the Victor of Culloden. Gradually the horn box was enshrined within one case after another, usually silver lined with velvet, each case bearing inscribed plates commemorating persons or events. A past overseer, who detained the box in 1793, had to give it back after three years of litigation. A case of octagon shape records the triumph of justice, and Lord Chancellor Lobrow pronouncing his decree for the restitution of the box on March 5, 1796. In later days, many and various additions have been made to the many coverings of the box, recording public events of interest. Notwithstanding the unfashionableness of tobacco, there were still some noteworthy smokers to be found among the clergy. Dr. Sumner, headmaster of Harrow, who died in 1771, was devoted to his pipe. The greatest of clerical tobacconists of late 18th century and early 19th century date was the once famous Dr. Parr. It is from him that Dr. Sumner learned to smoke. When he and Parr got together, Sumner was in the habit of refilling his pipe again and again, in such a way as to be unobserved, at the same time begging Parr not to depart till he had finished his pipe in order that he might detain him, we are told, in the evening as long as possible. Parr was not a model smoker. He was brutally overbearing towards other folk, and would accept no invitation except on the understanding that he might smoke when and where he liked. It was his invariable practice, wherever he might be visiting, to smoke a pipe as soon as he had got out of bed. His biographer says the ladies were obliged to bear his tobacco, or to give up his company, and at Hatton, 1786 to 1825, now and then he was the tyrant of the fireside. Parr was capable of smoking twenty pipes in an evening, and described himself as rolling volcanic fumes of tobacco to the ceiling while he worked at his desk. At a dinner which was given at Trinity College, Cambridge, to the Duke of Gloucester, as Chancellor of the University, when the cloth was removed, Parr at once started his pipe and began, says one who was present, blowing a cloud into the faces of his neighbors much to their annoyance, and causing royalty to sneeze by the stimulating stench of Mundungus. It is surprising that people were willing to put up with such bad manners as Parr was accustomed to exhibit, but his reputation was then great and he traded upon it. Parr is said, on one occasion, to have called for a pipe after taking a meal at a coaching-in called the bush at Bristol, when the waiter told him that smoking was not allowed at the bush. Parr persisted, but the authorities at the inn were firm in their refusal to allow anything so vulgar as smoking on their premises, whereupon Parr is said to have exclaimed, Why, man, I have smoked in the dining-room of every nobleman in England. The Duchess of Devonshire said I could smoke in every room of her house but her dressing-room, and here in this dirty public house of Bristol you forbid smoking. Amazing! Bring me my bill. The learned doctor exaggerated no doubt as regards the facilities given him for smoking, for it was his overbearing way not to ask for leave to smoke, but to smoke wherever he went, whether invited to do so or not. But the story shows the prejudice against smoking, which was found in many places as a result of the attitude of the fashionable world towards tobacco. John Stone, Parr's biographer, referring to his hero's failure to obtain preferment to the Episcopal Bench about the year 1804, says, His pipe might be deemed in these fantastic days a degradation at the table of the palace or the castle, but his noble hospitality, combined with his habits of sobriety, whether tobacco fumigated his table or not, would have filled his hall with the learned and the good. A portrait of Parr hangs in the combination room in St. John's, Cambridge. Originally it represented him faithfully with a long clay between hand and mouth, but for some unknown reason the pipe has been painted out. A famous crony of Parr's, the learned porcine, was another devotee of tobacco. In November 1789, Parr wrote to Dr. Bernie, The books may be consulted and porcine shall do it, and he will do it. I know his price when he bargains with me, two bottles instead of one, six pipes instead of two, burgundy instead of claret, liberty to sit till five in the morning instead of sneaking into bed at one. These are his terms. And these few lines it may be added give a graphic picture of porcine. According to Maltby, porcine once remarked that when smoking began to go out of fashion, learning began to go out of fashion also, which shows what nonsense a learned man could talk. Another famous parson, the reverent John Newton, was a smoker, and so was Cowper's other clerical friend that learned and able to center the reverent William Bull, whose whole mean and bearing were so dignified that on two occasions he was mistaken for a bishop. Cowper appreciated snuff, but he did not care for smoking, and when he wrote to Unwin, describing his new-made friend in terms of admiration, he concluded, Such a man is Mr. Bull, but he smokes tobacco, nothing is perfection, nihil est ab omniparte bidom. Bull, however, was not excessive in his smoking, for his daily allowance was but three pipes. In his garden at Newport Pagnell, Bull showed Cowper a nook in which he had placed a bench where he said he found it very refreshing to smoke his pipe and meditate. Here he sits, wrote Cowper, with his back against one brick wall and his nose against another, which must, you know, be very refreshing and greatly assist meditation. Cowper's aversion from tobacco could not have been very strong, for he encouraged his friend to smoke in the famous summer house at Olney, which was the poet's outdoor study. Bull smoked orinoco tobacco, which he carried in one of the tobacco boxes, which in those days were much more commonly used than pouches, and this box, on one occasion, he accidentally left behind him at Olney. Cowper returned it to him, with the well-known rhymed epistle dated June 22nd, 1782, and beginning. If reading verse be your delight, tis mine as much or more to write, but what we would, so weak as man, lies oft remote from what we can. He describes the box and its contents in lines which show not only tolerance but appreciation of tobacco, from which it is not unreasonable to infer that Cowper's first view of his friend's smoking habit as a drawback, as shown in his letter to Unwin, quoted above, had been modified by neighborhood and custom. It might have been well for the poet himself if he had learned to smoke a social pipe with his friend Bull. The appreciative lines run thus. This oval box, well-filled with best tobacco, finely milled, beats all Antichyra's pretenses to disengage the encumbered senses. O nymph of transatlantic fame, where ere thine hunt, what ere thy name? Whether reposing on the side of orinoco's spacious tide, or listening with delight, not small, to Niagara's distant fall, tis thine to cherish and to feed, the pungent nose-refreshing weed, which, whether pulverized it gain a speedy passage to the brain, or whether touched with fire it rise encircling eddies to the skies, does thought more quicken and refine than all the breath of all the nine. Forgive the bard if bard he be, who wants to wantonly made free to touch with a satiric wipe that symbol of thy power the pipe, and so may smoke in hailing bold be always filling never full. The allusion in these verses to a satiric wipe refers to a passage in the poem entitled Conversation, which Calper had written the previous year, 1781. In this passage, tobacco is abused in terms which Calper clearly felt to need modification after his personal intercourse, which such a smoker as his friend Bull. In describing, in Conversation, the manner in which a story is sometimes told, the poet says, The pipe with solemn interposing puff makes half a sentence at a time enough. The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain, then pause and puff and speak and pause again. Such often, like the tube they so admire, important triflers have more smoke than fire. Calper then goes on to attack tobacco in lines which show how unpopular smoking at that date was with the ladies, in which have since often been quoted by anti-tibaconists with grateful appreciation. Pernicious weed who sent the fair a noise unfriendly to society's chief joys, thy worst effect is banishing for ours the sex whose presence civilizes ours. Thou art indeed the drug a gardener wants, to poison vermin that infest his plants. But are we so to wit and beauty blind as to despise the glory of our kind and show the softest minds and fairest forms as little mercy as the grubs and worms? Notwithstanding this satiric swipe, it is not likely that Calper would have had much sympathy with John Wesley, who, in his detestation of what had been his father's solace at Epworth, forbade his preachers either to smoke or to take snuff. In the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century, smoking reached its nadir. No dandy smoked. If some witnesses may be believed, smoking had almost died out even at Oxford. Archdeacon Denison wrote in his Memories, When I went up to Oxford, 1823 to 24, there were two things unknown in Christchurch, and I believe very generally in Oxford, smoking and slang. But one cannot help fancying that the Archdeacon's memory was not quite trustworthy. It is difficult to imagine that there was ever a time when the slang of the day was not current on the lips of young Oxford, or that so long as tobacco was procurable, it did not find its way into college rooms. If smoking had died out at Oxford, its decline must have been rapid. When a certain young John James was an undergraduate of Queens, 1778 to 1781, he and his correspondence spoke severely of the miserable condition of fellows who, under the liberal pretense of educating youth, spent half their lives in smoking tobacco and reading the newspapers. About 1800, the older or more old-fashioned of the fellows at New College, not liking the then newly introduced luxury of turkey carpets, says Mr. G. B. Cox in his Recollections of Oxford, 1868, often adjourned to smoke their pipe in a little room opposite to the senior common room, now appropriated to other uses, but then kept as a smoking room. A Mr. Rhodes, a one-time fellow of Worcester College, who was elected Esquire Bidell in Medicine and Arts in 1792, had a very peculiar way of enjoying his tobacco. Mr. Cox says, On one occasion, when I had to call upon him, I found him drinking rum and water and enjoying, what he called his luxury, the fumes of tobacco, not through a pipe or in the shape of a cigar, but burnt in a dish. Smoking had certainly not died out at Cambridge, even at the time when Denison was at Oxford. According to the Gradus ad Contabrigium, 1824, the Cambridge smart man's habit was to dine in the evening at his own rooms or at those of a friend, and afterward blows a cloud, puffs at a cigar, and drinks copiously. The spelling of cigar shows that cigars were then somewhat of a novelty. When Denison was an undergraduate at Cambridge, 1828 to 1830, he and his companions all smoked. At the meetings of the apostles, the little group of friends, which included the future laureate, much coffee was drunk, much tobacco smoked. Don's smoked as well as undergraduates. At Queen's, the combination room in Denison's time had still a sanded floor, and the table was set handsomely forth with long church wardens, as the poet told Palgrave when the two visited Cambridge in 1859. George Prime in his autobiographic recollections, 1870, states that in 1800 smoking was allowed in the Trinity combination room after supper in the twelve days of Christmas when a few old men availed themselves of it, which looks as if tobacco were not very popular just then at Trinity. With the wine, pipes, and the large silver tobacco box were laid on the table. Porson, when asked for an inscription for the box, suggested Greek, To Bacchio. Prime says that among the undergraduates of whom he was one, tobacco had no favor, and an attempt of Mr. Ginkel, son of Lord Elthon, to introduce smoking at his own wine parties failed, although he had the prestige of being a hat fellow commoner. No doubt smoking had its ups and downs at the universities apart from the set of the main current of fashion. We learn from the invaluable gunning that at Cambridge about 1786 smoking was going out of fashion among the junior members of our combination rooms, except on the river in the evening when every man put a short pipe in his mouth. I took great pains, he adds, to make myself master of this elegant accomplishment, but I never succeeded, though I used to renew the attempt with a perseverance worthy of a better cause. About the same time Dr. Farmer was master of Immanuel, and the master was an inveterate smoker. Gunning says that Immanuel Parler under Farmer's presidency was always open to those who loved pipes and tobacco and cheerful conversation, a very natural collocation of tastes. Farmer's silver tobacco pipe is still preserved in his old college, while Porson's Japan Snuffbox is at Trinity. Dr. Farmer was elected master of Immanuel in 1775, years before he had held the curacy of Swavacy about nine miles out of Cambridge, where he regularly performed the duty. After morning service it was his custom to repair to the local public house where he enjoyed a mutton chop and potatoes. Immediately after the removal of the cloth, Mr. Dobson, his church warden, and one or two of the principal farmers, made their appearance, to whom he invariably said, I am going to read prayers, but shall be back by the time you have made the punch. Occasionally another farmer accompanied him from church, when pipes and tobacco, with the punch, were in requisition till six o'clock. The sabbath afternoon, thus satisfactorily concluded, Farmer returned to college in Cambridge and took a nap. Till at nine he went to the parlor of the college, where the fellows usually assembled, and pipes and tobacco concluded a well-spent day. In the fashionable world the Snuffbox was all powerful. The Prince Regent was devoted to Snuff, but disdained tobacco. He had a seller of Snuff, which after his death was sold, said John Bull, August 15, 1830, to a well-known purveyor for four hundred pounds. Lord Petersham, famous among dandies, made a wonderful collection of Snuffs and Snuffboxes, and was curious in his choice of a box to carry. Grono relates that once when a light savray Snuffbox, which Lord Petersham was using, was admired, the noble owner replied with a gentle list, Yes it is a nice summer box, but would certainly be inappropriate for winter wear. The well-known purveyor who bought the Prince Regent's seller of Snuff, and who bought also Lord Petersham's stock, was the Fryberg of Fryberg and Trayer, whose well-known old-fashioned shop at the stop of the Haymarket, with the bow window on each side of the door, still gives an 18th century flavor to that thoroughfare. All the dandies of the period were connoisseurs of Snuff and imitated the royal mirror of fashion in their devotion to the scented powder. Young Charles Stanhope wrote to his brother on November 5, 1812, I have learned to take Snuff, among other fashionable acquirements, a custom which, of course, you have learned, and will be able to keep me in countenance. But no dandies or young men of fashion smoked. Tobacco, save in the disguise of Snuff, was tabooed. Smoking was frowned upon, even in places where hitherto it had been allowed. In 1812 the authorities of Sion College ordered that coffee and tea be provided in the parlor for the visitors and incumbents, and in the courtroom for the curates and lecturers, and that pipes and tobacco be not allowed, and that no wine be at any time carried into the courtroom nor any into the hall after coffee and tea shall have been ordered on that day. The use of tobacco for smoking, as I have said, had reached its nadir, in the fashionable world, that is to say. But the dawn follows the darkest hour, and the revival of smoking was at hand thanks to the cigar.