ong churchwarden in your mouth, and
consequently the short clay was most favoured by young men at
Sandhurst and the Universities.... Labourers smoked short clays when
out of doors, and churchwardens when they rested from their labours
and took their ease in their inn in the evenings."

Mr. Furniss, in the paragraph quoted on a previous page, says: "No
gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a 'weed' in the
streets." The nearest approach to this seems to have been smoking on
club steps. Thackeray, in the seventeenth chapter of the "Book of
Snobs," speaks of dandies smoking their cigars upon the steps of
"White's," most fashionable of clubs, and, in an earlier chapter, of
young Ensign Famish lounging and smoking on the steps of the "Union
Jack Club," with half a dozen other "young rakes of the fourth or
fifth order." Two of Thackeray's own drawings in the "Book of
Snobs"--in chapters three and nine--show men, one civil the other
military, smoking cigars out of doors; but as these were no doubt
arrant snobs, the drawings may be accepted as proof of Mr. Furniss's
statement.

In this same book Thackeray says ironically--"Think of that den of
abomination, which, I am told, has been established in _some_ clubs,
called the _Smoking-Room_." The satirist was very familiar with the
smoking-room at the club he loved well--the "Little G."--the Garrick.
The original Garrick club-house was at 35 King Street, Covent Garden,
where the club was founded in 1831. It had formerly been a quiet,
old-fashioned family hotel, but apparently was not furnished with a
smoking-room, for one of the first acts of the club, when they
obtained possession of the house, was to build out over the "leads" a
large and comfortable smoking-room. Shirley Brooks said that this
room, which was reached by a long passage from the Strangers'
Dining-room, "was not a cheerful apartment by daylight, and when
empty, but which, at night and full, was thought the most cheerful
apartment in Town." At other clubs of more fashion, perhaps, but
certainly of less good-fellowship, smoking-rooms made their way more
slowly. At White's, smoking was not allowed at all till 1845. The
Alfred Club, founded in 1808, which Lord Byron described as
pleasant--"a little too sober and literary, perhaps, but, on the
whole, a decent resource on a rainy day," and which Sir William Fraser
called "a sort of minor Athenaeum," owed its death in 1855, if report
be true, to a dispute about s