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.

X

EARLY VICTORIAN DAYS

Scent to match thy rich perfume
Chemic art did ne'er presume
Through her quaint alembic strain,
None so sovereign to the brain.

LAMB, _A Farewell to Tobacco._

The social attitude towards smoking in early Victorian days, and for
some time later, was curious. The development of cigar-smoking among
those classes from which tobacco had long been practically banished,
and the natural consequent spread downwards of the use of cigars--in
accordance with the invariable law of fashion--together with the
continued devotion to the pipe among those whose love of tobacco had
never slackened, made smoking a much more general practice than it had
been for some generations.

It is somewhat significant that Dickens, in the "Old Curiosity Shop,"
1840, makes that repulsive dwarf, Quilp, smoke cigars. When the little
monster comes home unexpectedly in the fourth chapter of the book, and
breaks up his wife's tea-party, he settles himself in an
arm-chair--"with his large head and face squeezed up against the back,
and his little legs planted on the table"--with a case-bottle of rum,
cold water, and a box of cigars before him. "Now, Mrs. Quilp," he
says, "I feel in a smoking humour, and shall probably blaze away all
night. But sit where you are, if you please, in case I want you."
Quilp smokes cigars one after the other, his wretched wife sitting