he Prince Consort detested it, so tobacco was taboo
wherever the Court was. The late Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived to see
the new triumph of tobacco, said that she thought the greatest minor
change in social habits which she had witnessed was that in the
attitude assumed towards smoking, which, in her youth, "and even
later, was, except in certain well-defined circumstances, regarded as
little less than a heinous crime." Lady Dorothy remarked that
"smoking-rooms in country houses were absolutely unknown"--but that
was not quite correct as we shall see in the experiences of Professor
von Holtzendorff, to be mentioned directly--and that "such gentlemen
as wished to smoke after the ladies had gone to bed used, as a matter
of course, to go either to the servants' hall or to the harness-room
in the stables, where at night some sort of rough preparation was
generally made for their accommodation.... Well do I remember the
immense care which devotees of tobacco used to take, when sallying
forth in the country to enjoy it, not to allow the faintest whiff of
smoke to penetrate into the hall as they lit their cigars at the
door."

In 1845 Dickens wrote: "I generally take a cigar after dinner when I'm
alone." The reservation in the last three words may be noted. In the
"Book of Snobs," Major Wellesley Ponto goes to smoke a cigar in the
stables--Ponto had no smoking-room--with Lord Gules, who is described
as a "very young, short, sandy-haired and tobacco-smoking nobleman,
who cannot have left the nursery very long." Later, Ponto and Gules
"resume smoking operations ... in the now vacant kitchen."

Even so late as 1861 the attitude towards smoking was still much the
same in some quarters. In that year a German scholar, Professor Franz
von Holtzendorff, paid a visit to a country gentleman's house in
Gloucestershire--Hardwicke Court. Later he printed an account of his
experiences, a translation of which was published in this country in
1878. When the professor arrived, his host, the first greeting over,
at once pointed out to him a secluded apartment--the one which he
thought it most important for a German to know, namely, the
smoking-room. "According to his idea," continued the professor, "every
German has three national characteristics, smoking, singing, and
Sabbath-breaking; the first and only idea in which I found him led
astray by an abstract theory." Later, his hostess, explaining to him
the method and routine of life in an E