at cigarettes were not then familiar to
English people.

Laurence Oliphant, who was both a man of letters and a man of fashion,
is generally credited with the introduction into English society of
the cigarette; but it is difficult to suggest even an approximate
date. Writing from Boulogne to W.H. Wills in September 1854, Dickens
says, "I have nearly exhausted the cigarettes I brought here," and
proceeds to give directions for some to be sent to him from London.
This is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette-smoking in
England; but it is possible that by "cigarettes" Dickens meant not
what we now know as such, but simply small cigars. Mr. H.M. Hyndman,
in his "Record of an Adventurous Life," says that when he was living
as a pupil, about the year 1860, with the Rector of Oxburgh, his
fellow-pupils included "Edward Abbott of Salonica, who, poor fellow,
was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings
at the beginning of the Turco-Servian War. Cigarette-smoking, now so
popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the
finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself,
was the first devotee of this habit I encountered."

Fairholt, in his book on "Tobacco," which was published in 1859,
mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central
America, but makes no reference to their use in this country.

The late Lady Dorothy Nevill said that although cigarettes are a
modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly
different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "when old
Peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece
of paper. They called this a _papelito_, and I fancy it was much the
same thing as a cigarette." But if this were so, the habit must have
died out long before the cigarette, as we now know it, came into
vogue.

It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there
may have been an occasional cigarette-smoker in England, like the
Edward Abbott of Mr. Hyndman's reminiscences, yet it was not until a
little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls of tobacco
became at all common among Englishmen; and it is quite likely that the
credit (or discredit, as the reader pleases) of bringing them into
general, and especially into fashionable, use, has been rightly given
to Laurence Oliphant.

Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870. In "Puck," which was
publish