Signs Of Revival


Some sigh for this and that

My wishes don't go far;

The world may wag at will,

So I have my cigar.



THOMAS HOOD.





The revival of smoking among those who were most amenable to the

dictates of fashion, and among whom consequently tobacco had long been

in bad odour, came by way of the cigar.



In the preceding chapters all
he references to and illustrations of

smoking have been concerned with pipes. Until the early years of the

nineteenth century the use of cigars was practically unknown in this

country. The earliest notices of cigars in English books occur in

accounts of travel in Spain and Portugal, and in the Spanish Colonies,

and in such notices the phonetic spelling of segar often occurs. A

few folk still cling to this spelling--there was a segar-shop in the

Strand till quite recently, and I saw the notice segars the other

day over a small tobacco-shop in York--which has no authority, and on

etymological grounds is indefensible. The derivation of cigar is not

altogether clear; but the probabilities are strongly in favour of its

connexion with cigarra, the Spanish name for the cicada, the

shrilly-chirping insect familiar in the southern countries of Europe,

and the subject of frequent allusions by the ancient writers of Greece

and Rome, as well as by modern scribes. A Spanish lexicographer of

authority says that the cigar has the form of a cicada of paper,

and, on the whole, it is highly probable that the likeness of the roll

of tobacco-leaf to the cylindrical body of the insect (_cigarra_) was

the reason that the cigarro was so called. There is no warrant of

any kind for segar.



The earliest mention of cigars in English occurs in a book dated 1735.

A traveller in Spanish America, named Cockburn, whose narrative was

published in that year, describes how he met three friars at

Nicaragua, who, he says, gave us some Seegars to smoke ... these are

Leaves of Tobacco rolled up in such Manner that they serve both for a

Pipe and Tobacco itself ... they know no other way here, for there is

no such Thing as a Tobacco-Pipe throughout New Spain.



Cheroots seem to have been known somewhat earlier. The earliest

mention of them is dated about 1670. Sir James Murray, in the great

Oxford Dictionary, gives the following interesting extract from an

unpublished MS. relating to India, written between 1669 and 1679: The

Poore Sort of Inhabitants vizt. yet Gentues, Mallabars, &c., Smoke

theire Tobacco after a very meane, but I judge Original manner, Onely

ye leafe rowled up, and light one end, holdinge ye other between their

lips ... this is called a bunko, and by ye Portugals a Cheroota. The

condemnation of cheroot-or cigar-smoking as a mean method of taking

tobacco has an odd look in the light of modern habits and customs.



The use of cigars in this country began to come in early in the last

century; and by at least 1830 they were being freely, if privately,

smoked. It is probable that the reduction of the duty on cigars from

18s. to 9s. a lb., in 1829, had its effect in making cigars more

popular. Croker, in 1831, commenting on Johnson's saying that smoking

had gone out, said: The taste for smoking, however, has revived,

probably from the military habits of Europe during the French wars;

but instead of the sober sedentary pipe, the ambulatory cigar is

chiefly used. Croker's shrewd suggestion was probably not far wide of

the truth. It is quite likely, if not highly probable, that the

revival of smoking in the shape of the cigar was directly connected

with the experiences of British officers in Spain and Portugal during

the Peninsular War.



One of the earliest cigar-smokers must have been that remarkable

clergyman, the Rev. Charles Caleb Colton, whose Lacon, published in

1820, was once popular. Colton was in succession Rector of Tiverton

and Vicar of Kew, but on leaving Kew became a wine-merchant in Soho.

While at Kew he is said to have kept cigars under the pulpit, where,

he said, the temperature was exactly right.



At first even cigar-smoking was confined to comparatively few persons,

and the social prejudice against tobacco continued unabated. Thackeray

significantly makes Rawdon Crawley a smoker--the action of Vanity

Fair takes place in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

The original smoking-room of the Athenaeum Club, which was founded in

1824, the present building being erected in 1830, was a miserable

little room, Dr. Hawtree, on behalf of the committee, announcing that

no gentleman smoked. The Oriental Club, when built in 1826-27,

contained no smoking-room at all.



Sir Walter Scott often smoked cigars, though he seems to have regarded

it in the light of an indulgence to be half-apologized for. In his

Journal, July 4, 1829, he noted--When I had finished my bit of

dinner, and was in a quiet way smoking my cigar over a glass of negus,

Adam Ferguson comes with a summons to attend him to the Justice

Clerk's, where, it seems, I was engaged. I was totally out of case to

attend his summons, redolent as I was of tobacco. But I am vexed at

the circumstance. It looks careless, and, what is worse, affected; and

the Justice is an old friend moreover. Tobacco in any form was

suspect. A man might smoke a cigar, but he must not take the odour

into the drawing-room of even an old friend.



A few years earlier, in November 1825, Scott had written in his

Journal that after dinner he usually smoked a couple of cigars which

operated as a sedative--



_Just to drive the cold winter away,

And drown the fatigues of the day._



I smoked a good deal, he continued, about twenty years ago when at

Ashestiel; but, coming down one morning to the parlour, I found, as

the room was small and confined, that the smell was unpleasant, and

laid aside the use of the _Nicotian weed_ for many years; but was

again led to use it by the example of my son, a hussar officer, and my

son-in-law, an Oxford student. I could lay it aside to-morrow; I laugh

at the dominion of custom in this and many things.



_We make the giants first, and then_ do not _kill them._



Scott's remark that Lockhart smoked when an Oxford student rather

discredits Archdeacon's Denison's statement, quoted in the preceding

chapter, that smoking was very generally unknown in Oxford in 1823-24.

The archdeacon was writing from memory--a very untrustworthy recorder;

Scott's remark was that of a contemporary.



Byron is reputed to have been another cigar-smoker. His apostrophe to

tobacco in The Island (1823), a poem founded in part on the history

of the Mutiny of the Bounty, is familiar. The lines are, indeed,

almost the only familiar passage in that poem:



_Sublime tobocco! which, from east to west,

Cheers the tar's labours or the Turkman's rest;

Which on the Moslem's ottoman divides

His hours, and rivals opium and his brides;

Magnificent in Stamboul, but less grand,

Though not less loved, in Wapping or the Strand:

Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe,

When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe;

Like other charmers, wooing the caress,

More dazzlingly when daring in full dress;

Yet thy true lovers more admire by far

Thy naked beauties--Give me a cigar!_



How far these lines really represent the poet's own sentiments, and

whether he habitually smoked either cigar or pipe, is another matter.



Other men of letters of the time were zealous adherents of the pipe.

One of these was the poet Campbell. From 1820 to 1830 he was editor of

the _New Monthly Magazine_, and is reputed to have been so very

unbusinesslike in his methods that there was always difficulty in

getting proofs corrected and returned in good time. On one occasion,

as reported by a member of the firm that printed the magazine, a proof

had been lost, and the poet was informed that the article must go to

press next day uncorrected. Campbell sent word that he would look in

in the morning and correct it. Preparations were duly made to receive

him; he was shown into the best room, and left with the proof on his

table. After a while he rang the bell, and said, I could do this much

better if I had a pipe. Thereupon pipe and tobacco were procured and

taken in to him. Campbell tore open the paper containing the tobacco,

and, with a slightly contemptuous expression, exclaimed, Ugh!

C'naster! I'd rather it had been shag!



Charles Lamb was a heavy pipe-smoker. He smoked too much--regretted

it--but continued to smoke, not wisely but too well. He came home

very smoky and drinky last night, says his sister of him.



When sending some books to Coleridge at Keswick in November 1802, Lamb

wrote--If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled

with a crumb of right Gloucester, blacked in the candle (my usual

supper), or peradventure, a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the

crevices, look to that passage more especially: depend upon it, it

contains good matter. To Lamb, a book read best over a pipe.



The following year he wrote to Coleridge--What do you think of

smoking? I want your sober, _average, noon opinion_, of it. I

generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it.

Morning is a girl, and can't smoke--she's no evidence one way or the

other; and Night is so evidently _bought over_, he can't be a very

upright judge. Maybe the truth is that _one_ pipe is wholesome, _two_

pipes toothsome, _three_ pipes noisome, _four_ pipes fulsome, _five_

pipes quarrelsome, and that's the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding

rather upon rhyme than reason.... After all, our instincts may be

best. It is clear from one or two references, that Lamb and Coleridge

had been accustomed to smoke together at their meetings in early days

at the Salutation and Cat--with less disastrous results to

Coleridge, it is to be hoped, than those which followed his Birmingham

smoke, as set forth in the preceding chapter.



In 1805 Lamb wrote to Wordsworth--now I have bid farewell to my

'sweet enemy' tobacco ... I shall, perhaps, set nobly to work.

Forthwith he set to work on the farce Mr. H., which some months

later was produced at Drury Lane and was promptly damned. After its

failure Lamb wrote to Hazlitt--We are determined not to be cast down.

I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man

must write smoky farces. But Lamb and his pipe were not to be parted

by even repeated resolutions to leave off smoking. It was years after

this that he met Macready at Talfourd's, and by way probably of saying

something to shock Macready; whose personality could hardly have been

sympathetic to him, uttered the remarkable wish that the last breath

he drew in might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.



It was in 1818 that Lamb published the collection of his writings, in

two volumes, which contained the well-known Farewell to Tobacco,

written in 1805, and referred to in the letter of that year to

Wordsworth quoted above. Its phrases of mingled abuse and affection

are familiar to lovers of Lamb.



Parr is reported to have once asked Lamb how he could smoke so much

and so fast, and Lamb is said to have replied--I toiled after it,

sir, as some men toil after virtue. But if all accounts are true,

Parr far outsmoked Lamb. If the essayist discontinued or modified his

smoking habits, he made up for it by devotion to snuff--a devotion

which his sister shared. A large snuff-box usually lay on the table

between them, and they pushed it one to the other.



But it is time to return to the cigar, and the changing attitude of

fashion towards smoking.



There would appear to have been some smokers who disliked the

new-fangled cigars. Angelo seems, from various passages in his

Reminiscences, to have been a smoker, and to have been very

frequently in the company of smokers, yet he could write: There are

few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that

we are again in England, than the superiority of our stage-coaches.

There is something very exhilarating in being carried through the air

with rapidity ... considering the rate at which stage-coaches now

travel [_i.e._ in and just before 1830] ... a place on the box or

front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat. But alas!

no human enjoyment is free from alloy. A Jew pedlar or mendicant

foreigner with his cigar in his mouth, has it in his power to turn the

draft of sweet air into a cup of bitterness. Perhaps Angelo's

objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by

a Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner, than to the cigar itself. Yet,

going on to describe a journey to Hastings, sitting on the roof in

front beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment

of dashing along, anecdote and jest going merrily on, we had the

annoyance of a coxcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air

which Heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar,

which looks as if his real objection was to _cigars_, as such.



The fashionable dislike of tobacco-smoke appears in the pages of

another descriptive writer--the once well known N.P. Willis, the

American author of many books of travel and gossip. In his

Pencillings by the Way, writing in July 1833, Willis describes the

prevalence of smoking in Vienna among all the nationalities that

thronged that cosmopolitan capital. It is, he says, like a fancy

ball. Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians,

Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and stinking costumes,

promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest

observation. Every third window is a pipe-shop, and they [presumably

the pipes] show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of

the passion. Some of them are marked '200 dollars.' The streets reek

with tobacco-smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within

the Glacis. Your hotel, your cafe, your coach, your friend, are all

redolent of the same disgusting odour. In the following year,

describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon's in Scotland,

Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed

up and conversation assumed a merrier cast, then coffee and

liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more

slowly, and at eleven o'clock there was a general move to the

drawing-room. The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four

hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain

from Willis's silence on the subject--the disgusting odour would

surely have disturbed him--that no single member of the large

dinner-party dreamed of smoking, or, at all events, attempted to

smoke.



By 1830 smoking had so far come in again that a considerable

proportion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers.

Macaulay has drawn for us the not very attractive picture of the

smoking-room of the old House of Commons--before the fire of 1834--in

a letter to his sister dated in the summer of 1831. I have left Sir

Francis Burdett on his legs, he wrote, and repaired to the

smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables

covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is

generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a

perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen (tell it not to the West

Indians), Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not

believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open,

and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself.

In July 1832 he again dated a letter to his sisters from the House of

Commons smoking-room. I am writing here, he says, at eleven at

night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres ... with the smell

of tobacco in my nostrils.... Reject not my letter, though it is

redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room--



_The room,--but I think I'll describe it in rhyme,

That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime.

The smell of tobacco was always the same:

But the chloride was bought since the cholera came._



The mention of pigtail shows that the House contained pipe- as well as

cigar-smokers. A few days later he wrote again to his sisters, but

this time from the library, where, he says, we are in a far better

atmosphere than in the smoking-room, whence I wrote to you last week.

One wonders why Macaulay, who apparently did not smoke himself, and

who, though somewhat more tolerant of tobacco than his father, Zachary

Macaulay, evidently did not like the atmosphere of the smoking-room,

chose to write there, when the library--where he must surely have felt

more at home--was available.



Among other well-known men of standing and fashion who were smokers

about this period may be named Lord Eldon, Lord Stowell, Brougham,

Lord Calthorp and H.R.H. the Duke of Sussex. In Thackeray's Book of

Snobs, Miss Wirt, the governess at Major Ponto's, refers in shocked

tones to H.R.H. the poor dear Duke of Sussex (such a man my dears,

but alas! addicted to smoking!).



Sad to say, the Royal Duke was not content with the cigar that was

becoming fashionable, but actually smoked a pipe. Mrs. Stirling, in

The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope, 1913, notes that

Lord Althorp was a frequent visitor about 1822 at Holkham, the

well-known seat of Mr. Coke of Norfolk, later Lord Leicester, and that

on such occasions he enjoyed the distinction of being the only guest

besides the Duke of Sussex who ever indulged in the rare habit of

smoking. But while the Royal Duke was wont to puff away at a long

meerschaum in his bedroom till he actually blinded himself, and all

who came near him, Fidele Jack [Lord Althorp's nickname] behaved in

more considerate fashion, only smoking out of doors as he passed

restlessly up and down the grass terrace.



With the revival of smoking, things changed at Holkham. On Christmas

Day, 1847, Lady Elizabeth, writing to her husband from Holkham, the

home of her childhood, remarked: The Billiard table is always lighted

up for the gentlemen when they come from shooting, and there they sit

smoking.



The growing popularity of the cigar made smoking less unfashionable

than it had been among the upper classes of society; but among humbler

folk pipe-smoking had never gone out. Every public-house did its

regular trade in clays, known as churchwardens and Broseleys, and by

other names either of familiarity or descriptive of the place of

manufacture; and on the mantelpiece or table of inn or ale-house stood

the tobacco-box. Miss Jekyll, in her delightful book on Old West

Surrey, figures an example of these old public-house tobacco-boxes

which is made of lead. It has bosses of lions' heads at the ends, and

a portrait in relief on the front of the Duke of Wellington in his

plumed cocked hat. Inside, there is a flat piece of sheet-lead with a

knob to keep the tobacco pressed close, so that it may not dry up.



A curious and popular variety of tobacco-box often to be found in

rural inns and ale-houses was made somewhat on the principle of the

now everywhere familiar automatic machines. The late Mr. Frederick

Gale, in a column of Tobacco Reminiscences, which he contributed to

the _Globe_ newspaper in 1899, said, that at village outdoor festivals

of the 'thirties and early 'forties, respectable elderly farmers and

tradesmen would sit round a table, on which was an automatic, square,

brass tobacco-box of large dimensions, into which the smokers dropped

a halfpenny and the lid flew back, and the publican trusted to the

smoker's honour to fill his pipe and close the box. When the pipes

were filled they were lighted by means of tinder-box and flint, and a

stable lanthorn supplied by the ostler. A penny would appear to have

been a more usual charge, for a frequent inscription on the lid was:



_The custom is, before you fill,

To put a penny in the till;

When you have filled, without delay

Close the lid, or sixpence pay._



One of these old brass penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes was included in

the exhibition of Welsh Antiquities held at Cardiff in the summer of

1913.



In the Colchester Museum is an automatic tobacco-box and till of

japanned iron. On the lid of the box is painted a keg of tobacco and

two clay pipes; and on that of the till the following doggerel lines:



_A halfpeny dropt into the till,

Upsprings the lid and you may fill;

When you have filled, without delay,

Shut down the lid, or sixpence pay._



A correspondent of _Notes and Queries_, in 1908, mentioned that he

possessed two of these old penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes, and had

come across another in a dealer's shop of a somewhat peculiar make,

about which he wished to get information. It is of the ordinary

shape, he wrote, but differs from any I have previously seen in this

respect, that it works with a sixpence, and not with a penny or

halfpenny. It is engraved with the usual lines, except that the user

is asked to put sixpence in the till, and then to shut down the lid

under penalty of a fine of a shilling. What could it have been used

for that was worth sixpence a time? Other uncommon features are that

the money portion is shallow, and that the part for the tobacco

extends the whole length of the box. I should say that the box is much

smaller than any others I have ever seen. No information as to the

use of this curious box was forthcoming from any of the learned and

ingenious correspondents of _Notes and Queries_; and a problem which

they cannot solve may not unreasonably be regarded as insoluble.



Readers of Dickens are familiar with the drawing by Cruikshank which

illustrates the chapter on Scotland Yard in Dickens's Sketches by

Boz, which was written before 1836. It shows the coal-heavers sitting

round the fire shouting out some sturdy chorus, and smoking long

clays. Here, wrote Dickens, in a dark wainscoted-room of ancient

appearance, cheered by the glow of a mighty fire ... sat the lusty

coal-heavers, quaffing large draughts of Barclay's best, and puffing

forth volumes of smoke, which wreathed heavily above their heads, and

involved the room in a thick dark cloud. These good folk and others

of their kin had never been affected by any change of fashion in

respect of smoking. In another of the Sketches, the amusing Tuggs's

at Ramsgate, when poor Cymon Tuggs is hid behind the curtain, half

dead with fear, he hears Captain Waters call for brandy and

cigars--The cigars were introduced; the captain was a professed

smoker; so was the lieutenant; so was Joseph Tuggs. Poor Cymon, on

the other hand, was one of those who could never smoke without

feeling it indispensably necessary to retire, immediately, and never

could smell smoke without a strong disposition to cough.

Consequently, as the apartment was small, the door closed and the

smoke powerful, poor Cymon was soon compelled to cough, which

precipitated the catastrophe. It is noticeable that Dickens speaks of

the three worthies as _professed_ smokers, a remark which suggests

that such dare-devils, men who would take cigars as a matter of course

and for enjoyment, and not merely out of a complimentary acquiescence

in some one else's wish, were comparatively rare.



Other illustrations of folk who smoked, not cigars, but pipes, may be

drawn from Pickwick, which was published in 1836. At the very

beginning, when Mr. Pickwick calls a cab at Saint Martin's-le-Grand,

the first cab is fetched from the public-house, where he had been

smoking his first pipe. At Rochester, Mr. Pickwick makes notes on the

four towns of Strood, Rochester, Chatham and Brompton, where the

military were present in strength, and hence the observant gentleman

noted--The consumption of tobacco in these towns must be very great:

and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious

to those who are extremely fond of smoking. On the evening of the

election at Eatanswill, Tupman and Snodgrass resort to the commercial

room of the Peacock Inn, where the atmosphere was redolent of

tobacco-smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue

to the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains which

shaded the windows. Here, among others, were the dirty-faced man with

a clay pipe, the very red-faced man behind a cigar, and the man with a

black eye, who slowly filled a large Dutch pipe with most capacious

bowl. Tupman and Snodgrass were of the company and smoked cigars. Sam

Weller's father smoked his pipe philosophically. If Sam's

mother-in-law flies in a passion, and breaks his pipe, he steps out

and gets another. Then she screams wery loud, and falls into 'sterics;

and he smokes wery comfortably 'till she comes to agin. What better

example could there be of pipe-engendered philosophy? When Mr.

Pickwick and Sam look in at old Weller's house of call off Cheapside,

they find the boxes full of stage coachmen, drinking and smoking, and

among them is the old gentleman himself, smoking with great

vehemence. After having given his son valuable parental advice, Mr.

Weller, senior, refilled his pipe from a tin box he carried in his

pocket, and, lighting his fresh pipe from the ashes of the old one,

commenced smoking at a great rate.



A little later when Mr. Pickwick hunts up Perker's clerk Lowten, and

joins the jovial circle at the Magpie and Stump, he finds on his right

hand a gentleman in a checked shirt and Mosaic studs, with a cigar in

his mouth, who expresses the hope that the newcomer does not find

this sort of thing disagreeable. Not in the least, replied Mr.

Pickwick, I like it very much, although I am no smoker myself. I

should be very sorry to say I wasn't, interposes another gentleman on

the opposite side of the table. It's board and lodging to me, is

smoke. Mr. Pickwick glances at the speaker, and thinks that if it

were washing too, it would be all the better!



Later again when the couple o' Sawbones, the medical students, Ben

Allen and Bob Sawyer, make their first appearance on the scene, they

are discovered in the morning seated by Mr. Wardle's kitchen fire,

smoking cigars; and it is significant of how smoking out of doors was

then regarded that Dickens, going on to describe Sawyer in detail,

refers to that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which

is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout

and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian

names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious

description. Apparently in 1836 the only person who would allow

himself to be seen smoking in the street was of the kind naturally

inclined to do the other objectionable things mentioned. The same idea

runs through the allusions to tobacco in Pickwick. Smoking was

undeniably vulgar. Mr. John Smauker, who introduces Sam Weller at the

friendly swarry of the Bath footmen, smokes a cigar through an

amber tube--cigar-holders were a novelty. When Mr. Pickwick is taken

to the house of Namby, the sheriffs' officer, the principal features

of the front parlour are fresh sand and stale tobacco smoke. One of

the occupants of the room is a mere boy of nineteen or twenty, who,

though it was yet barely ten o'clock, was drinking gin and water, and

smoking a cigar, amusements to which, judging from his inflamed

countenance, he had devoted himself pretty constantly for the last

year or two of his life. Tobacco-smoke pervades the Fleet prison. In

fact, to trace tobacco through the pages of Pickwick is to realize

vividly how vulgar if not vicious an accomplishment smoking was

considered by the fashionable world and how popular it was among the

nobodies of the unfashionable world.



Similar morals may be drawn from other works of fiction. The action

of the first chapters of Thackeray's Pendennis passes early in the

nineteenth century. In the third chapter Foker has a cigar in his

mouth as he strolls with Pen down the High Street of Chatteris. Old

Doctor Portman meets them and regards with wonder Pen's friend, from

whose mouth and cigar clouds of fragrance issued, which curled round

the doctor's honest face and shovel hat. 'An old school-fellow of

mine, Mr. Foker,' said Pen. The doctor said 'H'm!' and scowled at the

cigar. He did not mind a pipe in his study, but the cigar was an

abomination to the worthy gentleman. The reverend gentleman in liking

his pipe was faithful to the traditional fondness for smoking of

parsons; but smoking must be in the study. To smoke in the street was

vulgar; and to smoke the newfangled cigar was worse.



Pendennis, when he comes home the first time from Oxbridge, brings

with him a large box of cigars of strange brand, which he smokes not

only about the stables and greenhouses, where they were good for his

mother's plants, and which were obviously places to which a man who

wished to smoke should betake himself, but in his own study, which

rather shocks his mother. Pen goes from bad to worse during his

University days, and, sad to say, one Sunday in the last long

vacation, the wretched boy, instead of going to church, was seen at

the gate of the Clavering Arms smoking a cigar, in the face of the

congregation as it issued from St. Mary's. There was an awful

sensation in the village society. Portman prophesied Pen's ruin after

that, and groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal. Later

the smoke from Warrington's short pipe and Pen's cigars floats through

many pages of the novel.



More

;