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 t