A Sussex rector, the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted Keynes, in 1656 and again in 1662, paid 1s. for two ounces of tobacco, i.e. at the rate of 8s. per lb. Presumably the rector bought the more expensive Spanish tobacco and the squire the cheaper Virginian. At the annual parish feast held at St. Bride's, Fleet Street, London, on May 24, 1666, the expenses included 3d. for tobacco for twenty or more adults. This too was doubtless Virginian or colonial tobacco. The North Elmham Church Accounts (Norfolk) for 1673 show that 12s. 4d. was paid for "Butter, cheese, Bread, Cakes, Beere and Tobacco and Tobacco Pipes at the goeing of the Rounds of the Towne." On the occasion of a similar perambulation of the parish boundaries in 1714-15 the churchwardens paid for beer, pipes and tobacco, cakes and wine. The account-books of the church and parish of St. Stephen, Norwich, for 1696-97 show 2s. as the price of a pound of tobacco. These entries, and many others of similar import, show that at feasts and at social and convivial gatherings of all kinds, tobacco maintained its ascendancy. Pipes and tobacco were included in the usual provision 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 15 foot high, that 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 Jeffreys—and other "bigwigs." Evelyn records with grave disapproval that "these great men spent the rest of the afternoon till 11 at night, in drinking healths, taking tobacco, and talking much beneath the gravity of judges, who had but a day or two before condemned Mr. Algernon Sidney."

Although smoking was general among parsons, yet attacks on tobacco were occasionally heard from pulpits. A Lancashire preacher named Thomas Jollie, who was one of the ministers ejected from Church livings by the Act of Uniformity, 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 caus 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 stirr me up in that case more than ordinary. The one I had from my reverend Brother Mr. Robert Whittaker, 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, 2, coming into his mind hee layd aside his taking of tobacco. The other instance was of a profane person living nigh Haslingdon (who was but poor) and took up his time in the trade of smoking and also spent what should reliev his poor family. This man dreamed that he was taking tobacco, and that the devill stood by him filling one pipe upon another for him. In the morning hee fell to his old cours notwithstanding; thinking it was but a dream: but when hee came to take his pipe, hee had such an apprehension that the devill did indeed stand by him and doe the office as hee dreamed that hee was struck speechless for a time and when hee came to himself hee threw his tobacco in the fire and his pipes at the walls; resolving never to meddle more with it: soe 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. Hearne, the antiquary, writing early in 1721, said that he had been told that in the Great Plague of London of 1665 none of those who kept tobacconists' shops suffered from it, and this belief no doubt enhanced the medical reputation of the weed. I have also seen it stated that during the cholera epidemics of 1831, 1849, and 1866 not one London tobacconist 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 tobacconist, 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 seventeenth century it was firmly held. Howell in one of his "Familiar Letters" dated January 1, 1646, says that the smoke of tobacco is "one of the wholesomest sents 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 showr of rain drave him into a Pigsty for shelter, wher he caus'd a pipe full to Be taken of purpose." But here Mr. Howell is certainly drawing the long-bow. One cannot imagine the author of the "Counterblaste" 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, Signes, Preservation from and Cure of the Pestilence," "collected by W. Kemp, Mr. 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 defence against bad air, being smoked in a pipe, either by itself, or with Nutmegs shred, and Rew Seeds mixed with it, especially if it be nosed"—which, I suppose, means if the smoke be exhaled through the nose—"for it cleanseth the air, and choaketh, suppresseth and disperseth any venomous vapour." 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 Cholerick, the Melancholy, the phlegmatick, take it without any manifest inconvenience, it quencheth 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 that wants sleep, and will keep one waking that is drowsie; it hath an offensive smell to some, and is more desirable than any perfume to others; that it is a most excellent preservative, both experience and reason do teach; it corrects the air by Fumigation, and it avoids corrupt humours by Salivation; for when one takes it either by Chewing it in the leaf, or Smoaking 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 Tobacconist, as to the helme of a Sublimatory, are voided and spitten out."

When plague was abroad even children were compelled to smoke. At the time of the dreadful visitation of 1665 all the boys at Eton were obliged to smoke in school every morning. One of these juvenile smokers, a certain Tom Rogers, years afterwards declared to Hearne, 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 Eton since this anti-tobacconist martyr received his whipping. It is sometimes stated that at this time smoking was generally practised 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 Hearne's record of the practice at Eton.

The belief in the prophylactic power of tobacco was, however, very generally held. When Mr. Samuel Pepys 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 roll tobacco to smell and chew. There is nothing to show that Pepys 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 distemper at all, but lived about twenty 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 rue 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. Mary-le-Strand; and among the bones were found a couple of the curious tobacco-pipes called "plague-pipes," because they are 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 in numbers so large that one antiquary, Mr. H. Syer Cuming, has ventured to infer that "almost every person who ventured from home invoked the protection of tobacco."

These seventeenth-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 licence." 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 ale-house keepers and others make pipes, but so unskilfully that they are brought into disesteem; they request to be comprehended in the Statute of Labourers of 5 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 seventeenth 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 maker's initials. Monograms and designs were stamped or moulded 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 at various places, by reference to the freeman and burgess rolls and parish registers. During the latter half of the seventeenth 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 one hundred and twenty pipes and one hundred Jew's harps were given for a strip of country near Timber Creek, in New Jersey. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, purchased a tract of land, and 300 pipes were included in the articles given in the exchange."

The French traveller, Sorbiere, 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 frequented 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 draught, and there he would spend twopence and consume an hour in smoking and talking, spending 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 Hawsted Place, desiring "to be remembered by the witty smoakers of Hawsted." A later Cullum, Sir John, published in 1784 a "History and Antiquities of Hawsted," and in describing Hawsted Place, which was rebuilt about 1570, says that there was a small apartment called the smoking-room—"a name," he says, "it acquired probably soon after it was built; and which it retained with good reason, as long as it stood." I should like to know on what authority Sir John Cullum could have made the assertion that the room was called the smoking-room from so early a date as the end of the sixteenth 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 "Bury Fair" of that date Lady Fantast says to her husband, Mr. Oldwit, who loves to tell of his early meetings with Ben Jonson and other literary heroes of a bygone day, "While all the Beau Monde, as my daughter says, are with us in the 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 play, says to his friends, "We'll 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 the 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, Cornhill, 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 they 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 club-houses of a much later day.



VI

SMOKING UNDER KING WILLIAM III AND QUEEN ANNE

Hail! social pipe—thou foe of care, Companion of my elbow-chair; As forth thy curling fumes arise, They seem an evening sacrifice— An offering to my Maker's praise, For all His benefits and grace.

SIR SAMUEL GARTH (1660-1718).

After King William III was settled on the throne the sum of L600,000 was paid to the Dutch from the English exchequer for money advanced in connexion 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 Burnet, 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 caustically 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. Budding wits thought themselves highly distinguished if they could obtain the honour of being allowed to take a pinch from it. Of Dr. Aldrich, who was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and who wrote a curious "Catch not more difficult to sing than diverting to hear, to be sung by four men smoaking 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 has lost: I am not smoking, only filling my pipe."

John Philips, the author of "Cyder" and the "Splendid Shilling," was an undergraduate at Christ Church, during Aldrich's term of office, and no doubt learned to smoke in an atmosphere so favourable to tobacco. In his "Splendid Shilling," which dates from about 1700, Philips says of the happy man with a shilling in his pocket:

Meanwhile, he smokes, and laughs at merry tale, Or Pun ambiguous or Conundrum quaint.

But the poor shillingless wretch can only

doze at home In garret vile, and with a warming puff Regale chill'd fingers; or from tube as black As winter-chimney, or well-polish'd jet, Exhale Mundungus, ill-perfuming scent.

The miserable creature, though without a shilling, yet possessed a well-coloured "clay."

It is significant that the writer of a life of Philips, 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 [Philips] 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 seventeenth 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 (1588-1679), was accustomed to dine at 11 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. Izaak 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 mentions smoking in the "Compleat 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 1657, and, says Dr. Jessopp, "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 staid 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 lookt upon him to bee a forwarde bolde lad: and tobacco I did not take: butt ... I saw hee had a flashy empty notion of religion: soe I took his pipe and putt it to my mouth and gave it to him again to stoppe 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 Friends' Monthly Meeting at Hardshaw, Lancashire: "14th of 4th mo. 1691. It being considered that the too frequent use of smoking Tobacco is inconsistent with friends 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 alehouses or elsewhere, tending to the abetting the common excess." Another Lancashire Monthly Meeting, Penketh, under date "18th 8th mo. 1691" suggested that Friends were "not to smoke during their labour 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 advyces and Counsells 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 custome are brought into bondag to the creature." The Aberdeen Friends themselves a little later were greatly concerned at the increasing indulgence in "superfluous apparell 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 Smoaking of Tobacco be forborn."

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, &c., on the base and lid. It has engraved on the sides the name and address of its owner—"Barnabas Barker, Wyvenhoe, 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, ale-house keepers were fined for permitting smoking in their houses. At Methwold, Suffolk, the folk improved upon this. The court-books of the manor of Methwold contain the following entry made at a court held on October 4, 1695: "We agree that any person that is taken smoakeinge tobacco in the street shall forfitt one shillinge for every time so taken, and itt shall be lawfull for the petty constabbles to distrane for the same for to be putt to the uses abovesaid [i.e. "to the use of the town"]. Wee present Nicholas Baker for smoakeinge in the street, and doe amerce him 1s." 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 Ely 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 tobacconists' shops for the sale of tobacco had long been common, the old business connexion between apothecaries and tobacco still occasionally existed.

The clay pipes called "aldermen," with longer stems than their predecessors, tipped with glaze, came into use towards the end of the seventeenth century. They must not be confused with the much longer "churchwarden" or "yard of clay" which was not in vogue till the early years of the nineteenth century.

Towards the close of the seventeenth 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 "Sack beere and Tobacco" at the Talbot on St. Luke's Day, October 18, 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, &c., "and everything needfull for L7. and if he gives content then to have L8. he provides all things but pipes, Tobacco, candles and beer"—which apparently fell to the lot of some other 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 learn that by general consent it was forbidden henceforward to smoke in the Court Room 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. Sorbiere, 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 inanity which Addison printed as the diary of a citizen in the Spectator of March 4, 1712, the devotion of the worthy retired tradesman to tobacco is emphasized. This is the kind of thing: "Monday ... Hours 10, 11 and 12 Smoaked three Pipes of Virginia ... one o'clock in the afternoon, chid Ralph for mislaying my Tobacco-Box.... Wednesday ... From One to Two Smoaked a Pipe and a half.... Friday ... From Four to Six. Went to the Coffee-house. Met Mr. Nisby there. Smoaked 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 guardroom, 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 boatswain'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, Cole 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 Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary, tells a strange story. He declares that, one evening which he spent with his brother at Garraway's Coffee-house, February 20, 1702, he was surprised to see his brother's "sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco and smoke it as audfarandly 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 Thoresby 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 Phillis or two, who invited you by their amorous glances into their smoaky territories." Admission cost little. There you might see—

Grave wits, who, spending farthings four, Sit, smoke, and warm themselves an hour.

The allusions 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 smoak a pipe at Child's and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-man, over-hear the conversation of every table in the room." And here is a vignette of coffee-house life in 1714 from No. 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-smoakers as an overture to conversation and friendship." From the very beginning smoking has induced and fostered a spirit of comradeship.

Sir Roger de Coverley, as a typical country squire, was naturally a smoker. He presented his friend the Spectator, the silent gentleman, with a 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 knight bid his Jehu to "stop by the way at any good Tobacconist's, and take in a Roll of their best Virginia." And when he visited Squire's near Gray's Inn Gate, 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 pipe-lighting. 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 prelate."

Addison and Steele smoked, and so did Prior, who seems to have had a weakness at times for low company. After spending an evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, 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 Long Acre, before he went to bed." Some of Prior's poems, as Thackeray caustically remarks, smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Pope for awhile attended the symposium at Button's coffee-house, where Addison was the centre of the coterie—he describes 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 Greeks' coffee-house in that town, in the morning and after 3 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 bachelors, masters 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 11 P.M., there was besides smoking and drinking of wine, though we did not do much of either. At 11 the reckoning was called for, and each person paid 2s."

There was clearly no prejudice against smoking at Cambridge. Abraham de la Pryme notes in his diary for the year 1694 that when it was rumoured 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 pitcher of ale, and tobacco and pipes, and wee'l sit up and see this spirit." The ale was duly provided, the pipes were lit, and the courageous smokers 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. D'Anvers, 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 II, i.e. they condescended to smoke fragments of mats. With this may be compared the macaronic lines:

At si Mundungus desit: tum non funcare recusant Brown-Paper tosta, vel quod fit arundine bed-mat.

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 ceased to be fashionable. Pepys has very few allusions to tobacco; Evelyn fewer still. There is little evidence as to whether or not the gallants of the Restoration Court smoked; but considering the foppery of their attire and manners, it seems almost certain that tobacco was not in favour among them. The beaux with their full wigs—they carried combs of ivory or tortoiseshell 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 flavour of tobacco in a pipe. They were still tobacco-worshippers; but they did not smoke. The Indian weed retained its empire over the men (and women) of fashion by changing its form. The beaux were the devotees of snuff. The deftly handled pinch pleasantly titillated 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 splendour of the rings upon the fingers. The curled darlings of the late seventeenth 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.



VII

SMOKING UNFASHIONABLE: EARLY GEORGIAN DAYS

Lord Fopling smokes not—for his teeth afraid; Sir Tawdry smokes not—for he wears brocade.

ISAAC HAWKINS BROWNE, 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 practised 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 seventeenth century did not again prevail until within living memory.

Throughout the eighteenth century the use of tobacco for smoking was largely confined to the middle and humbler classes of society. To smoke was characteristic of the "cit," 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 Colman and Bonnell 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 Redcap's, a favourite 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 week-end habit was strong among London tradesmen in those days. Another Connoisseur paper of 1754 refers to the citizens' 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 "ungenteel 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, Sussex, 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 smoaking-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 immortalized the squire of the mid-eighteenth 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, hearty, drinking, devil-may-care country gentleman, in which it is said, "he makes no scruple to take his pipe and pot at an alehouse 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 staied 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, Houghton, 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 squire's liking for tobacco. Gray wrote to Warton from Cambridge in April 1749 saying: "Time will settle my conscience, time will reconcile me to this languid companion (ennui); 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 be loath 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 as 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 freeborn Whig—

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 dons' love of tobacco is Thomas Warton. 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 puff'd my daily pipe's perfume! Rode for a stomach, and inspected, At annual bottlings, corks selected: And dined untax'd, untroubled, under The portrait of our pious Founder!

Warton and another Oxford smoker of some distinction—the Rev. 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 Eighteenth Century," gives an excellent English version of the Latin original of one of the Christ Church "Carmina Quadragesmalia," 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—

Ne'er swerves a hairbreadth 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 heir you'll find him doing still.

It seems to have been taken for granted that country parsons 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 1756 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 forthwith "filled his pipe, and drank very cordially to my friend," his host. One cannot doubt that Laurence Sterne, that most remarkable of country parsons, 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 inn 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 inn-yard, devoting himself to meditation, "assisted by the inspiring fumes of tobacco." Later on, in the parlour 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. Slipslop 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 squire is 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, holloaing, wrangling, drinking, toasting," and other diversions of "jolly companions."

There is no mention of Parson Trulliber's pipe, but that pig-breeder 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 exciseman who, early in the story, are found sitting in the inn kitchen with Parson Barnabas, "smoking their pipes over some syderand"—the mysterious "cup" being a mixture of cider and something spirituous—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 modification 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 Fraser, Lord Lovat, 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 Cogers, 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 roll of tobacco for grating, 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 to 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 coloured 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 a tobacco-pipe? Primed, cocked and toucht, 'twould 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 seem to have smoked at one time as a matter of course at their gatherings at Sion College, their headquarters. An entry in the records under date February 14, 1682, relating to a Court Meeting, runs: "Paid Maddocks [the Messenger] for Attendinge and Pipes 6d." 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 "corses" to each. The cost of the food, as Canon Pearce tells us in his excellent and entertaining book on the College and its Library, was L19 15s., or rather more than 13s. a head. The bill for wines and tobacco amounted to five guineas, or about 3s. 6d. a head, and for this modest sum the thirty convives enjoyed eleven gallons of "Red Oporto," one of "White Lisbon," and three of "Mountain," to the accompaniment of two pounds of tobacco (at 3s. 4d. the pound) smoked in "half a groce of pipes" (at 1s.).

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 practised as in the preceding century. Handel, I may note, enjoyed his pipe. Dr. Burney, when a schoolboy at Chester, was "extremely curious to see so extraordinary a man," so when Handel went through that city in 1741 on his way to Ireland, young Burney "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," 1731, 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 more 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 traveller, 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 Hearne 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 of September 4 on a scaffold specially erected for the purpose "over against the Theatre in Oxford ... just at Finmore's, an alehouse." 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 12s. "Many tryed," continues Hearne, "and 'twas thought that a journeyman taylour 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 'twas thought he would have dyed; and an old man, that had been a souldier, and smoaked gently, came off conqueror, smoaking the three ounces quite out, and he told one (from whom I had it) that, after it, he smoaked 4 or 5 pipes the same evening." The old soldier was a well-seasoned veteran.

Another foreign visitor to England, the Abbe Le Blanc, who was over here about 1730, found English customs rather trying. "Even at 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 remonstrances 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 the un-Quaker-like name of The Charming Polly, which brought a party of Friends across the Atlantic from Philadelphia in 1756, we find "In Samuel Fothergill's new chest ... Tobacco ... a Hamper ... a Barrel ... a box of pipes." The provident 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 deserved to be. To 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 menservants—the Dukes and Sir Harrys—offer one another snuff. "Taste this snuff, Sir Harry," says the "Duke." "'Tis good rappee," replies "Sir Harry." "Right Strasburgh, I assure you, and of my own importing," says the knowing ducal valet. "The city people adulterate it so confoundedly," he continues, "that I always import my own snuff;" and in similar vein 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 a grace, but they did not do anything so low as to smoke, and their menservants faithfully aped their preferences and their aversions.

Negative evidence of this kind is abundant; and positive statements of the aversion of the beaux from smoking are not lacking. Dodsley'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 Browne, and the poets imitated were the Laureate Cibber, Philips, Thomson, Young, Pope, and Swift. The first imitation is called "A New Year's Ode," and contains three recitatives, three airs and a chorus. One of the airs 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 Philips's "Splendid Shilling," is really pretty and must be given entire. It reveals unsuspected beauties in the simple "churchwarden," or "yard of clay":

Little tube of mighty pow'r, Charmer of an idle hour, Object of my warm desire, Lip of wax, and eye of fire: And thy snowy taper waist, With my finger gently brac'd; And thy pretty swelling crest, With my little stopper prest, And the sweetest bliss of blisses, Breathing from thy balmy kisses. Happy thrice, and thrice agen, Happiest he of happy men; Who when agen the night returns, When agen the taper burns; When agen 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 agen, 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 beaux.

The sixth sinks to ribaldry. Number four contains evidence of the distaste for smoking among the beaux in the lines:

Coxcombs prefer the tickling sting of snuff; Yet all their claim to wisdom is—a puff; Lord Foplin smokes not—for his teeth afraid: Sir Tawdry 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 excisemen 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 tobacconist 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 excisemen threatened all the land, Help'd 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 compleat thy bliss!

This print is now chiefly of interest because the plate was adorned with a tiny etching by Hogarth, in which appear 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 tail-piece to his works, which he prepared a few months before his death, and which he called The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in 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 in two 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 labelled "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 Stage-Coach, or Country Inn-yard, is shown an old woman smoking a pipe in the "basket" of the coach. The plate of The Distrest 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 arm-chair in which Hogarth was wont 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. Austin Dobson suggests that Hogarth and Fielding may have sat and smoked their pipes together in the days when George was King.



VIII

SMOKING UNFASHIONABLE (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 Rev. 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 hoc propter hoc 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 talk'd of their Raphaels, Corregios, and stuff, He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.

Johnson and all his company took snuff, as every one 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. Climenson's "Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Lybbe Powys," we hear of a bundle of papers at Hardwick House, near Whitchurch, Oxon, which bears the unvarnished title "Dick's Debts." This Dick was a Captain Richard Powys who had a commission in the Guards, and died at the early age of twenty-six in the year 1768. This list of debts, it appears, gives "the most complete catalogue of the expenses of a dandy of the Court of George II, consisting chiefly of swords, buckles, lace, Valenciennes and point d'Espagne, gold and amber-headed canes, tavern bills and chair hire." But in all the ample detail of Captain Powys's list of extravagances there is nothing directly or indirectly relating to smoking. The beaux 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 Delany correspondence, and so on. Neither Walpole nor any member of the world in which he lived would appear to have smoked. In Miss Burney's "Evelina," 1778, from the beginning to the end of the book there is no mention whatever of tobacco or of smoking. Apparently the vulgar Branghtons 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 a la Mode," 1760, 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 Rowlandson contains A Man of Fashion's Journal, dated May 1, 1802. The "man of fashion" rides and drinks, goes to the play, gambles and bets, but his journal contains no reference to smoking. Rowlandson himself smoked, and so did his brother caricaturist, Gillray. 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's 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 beclouded with tobacco-smoke as in earlier days. Grosley, 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 helped to amuse the company.

Angelo gives some lively pictures of scenes of this kind in the London of about 1780. The Turk's Head, in Gerrard 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 odour of tobacco never penetrated. It afforded, he says in his fine way, "a sort of antipodeal contrast to these smoking tavern clubs of the old city of Trinobantes." The same writer speaks of a certain Monsieur Liviez whom he met in Paris in 1772, who had been one of the first dancers at the Italian Opera House, and maitre 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, a l'Anglaise, smoked his pipe, and drank oceans of punch."

Coleridge, in the "Biographia 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, importuned 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 Coleridge'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 life-time, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with Oronooko. 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 bole 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 opened a small pacquet of letters, which he had received from Bristol for me, ere 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 another 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 to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' '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 inapposite 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 tradesman used, a half pipeful 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 Coleridge's adventure, i.e. in 1796, a tobacco-box with a history was the subject of a legal decision. This box, made of common horn and small enough to be carried in the pocket, was bought for fourpence 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 Loughborough 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, head master of Harrow, who died in 1771, was devoted to his pipe. The greatest of clerical "tobacconists" of late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century date was the once famous Dr. Parr. It was 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 (1786-1825) 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 neighbours, 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-inn 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've smoked in the dining-room of every nobleman in England. The Duchess of Devonshire said I could smoke in every room in 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.

Johnstone, 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 Porson, was another devotee of tobacco. In November 1789 Parr wrote to Dr. Burney: "The books may be consulted, and Porson 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 Porson. According to Maltby, Porson 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 Rev. John Newton, was a smoker, and so was Cowper's other clerical friend, that learned and able Dissenter, the Rev. William Bull, whose whole mien and bearing were so dignified that on two occasions he was mistaken for a bishop. Cowper appreciated snuff, but 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 omni parte beatum.'" 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 22, 1782, and beginning:

If reading verse be your delight, 'Tis mine as much, or more, to write; But what we would, so weak is 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 neighbourhood 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 Anticyra's pretences To disengage the encumbered senses. O Nymph of transatlantic fame, Where'er thine haunt, whate'er thy name, Whether reposing on the side Of Oronoco'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 In circling 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 once too wantonly made free, To touch with a satiric wipe That symbol of thy power, the pipe; * * * * * * * And so may smoke-inhaling Bull Be always filling, never full.

The allusion in these verses to a "satiric wipe" refers to a passage in the poem entitled "Conversation," which Cowper had written in the previous year, 1781. In this passage tobacco is abused in terms which Cowper clearly felt to need modification after his personal intercourse with 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.

Cowper then goes on to attack tobacco in lines which show how unpopular smoking at that date was with ladies, and which have since often been quoted by anti-tobacconists with grateful appreciation:

Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys, Unfriendly to society's chief joys, Thy worst effect is banishing for hours 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 wipe," it is not likely that Cowper 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, 1823-24, there were two things unknown in Christ Church, 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 Queen's, 1778 to 1781, he and his correspondents spoke severely of the "miserable condition of Fellows who (under the liberal pretence of educating youth) spend 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.V. 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 Bedel 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 Cantabrigium," 1824, the Cambridge smart man's habit was to dine in the evening "at his own rooms, or at those of a friend, and afterwards blows a cloud, puffs at a segar, and drinks copiously." The spelling of "segar" shows that cigars were then somewhat of a novelty.

When Tennyson was an undergraduate at Cambridge, 1828-30, 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." Dons smoked as well as undergraduates. At Queens', the Combination-room in Tennyson's time had still a sanded floor, and the "table was set handsomely forth with long 'churchwardens'"—as the poet told Palgrave when the two visited Cambridge in 1859. George Pryme, 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 "To bakcho." Pryme says that among the undergraduates, of whom he was one, tobacco had no favour, and "an attempt of Mr. Ginkell, son of Lord Athlone ... 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 Emmanuel and the Master was an inveterate smoker. Gunning says that Emmanuel parlour 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 japanned snuff-box is at Trinity.