achable stick._

Nowadays the cigarette is in such universal use, that it would be
impossible thus to associate it with any particular type of man, sane
or inane.

The late Bishop Mandell Creighton, of London, was an incessant smoker
of cigarettes. Mr. Herbert Paul, in his paper on the Bishop, says that
those who went to see him at Fulham on a Sunday afternoon always found
him, if they found him at all, "leisurely, chatty, hospitable, and
apparently without a care in the world. There was the family
tea-table, and there were the eternal cigarettes. The Bishop must have
paid a fortune in tobacco-duty." There is a side view of another
tobacco-lover in the "Note-Books" of Samuel Butler, the author of
"Erewhon." Creighton, after reading Butler's "Alps and Sanctuaries"
had asked the author to come and see him. Butler was in doubt whether
or not to go, and consulted his clerk, Alfred, on the matter. That
wise counsellor asked to look at the Bishop's letter, and then said:
"I see, sir, there is a crumb of tobacco in it; I think you can go."

Apart from cigarette-smoking, however, the use of tobacco grew
steadily during the later Victorian period. In "Mr. Punch's
Pocket-Book" for 1878 there was a burlesque dialogue between uncle and
nephew entitled "Cupid and 'Baccy." The uncle thinks the younger men
smoke too much, and declares that tobacco "has destroyed the
susceptibility, which in my time made youngsters fall in love, as they
often did, with a girl without a penny. No fellow can fall in love
when he has continually a pipe in his mouth; and if he ever feels
inclined to when it would be imprudent, why he lights his pipe, and
very soon smokes the idea of such folly out of his head. Not so when I
was of your age. Besides a few old farmers, churchwardens, and
overseers, and such, nobody then ever smoked but labourers and the
lower orders--cads as you now say. Smoking was thought vulgar. Young
men never smoked at all. To smoke in the presence of a lady was an
inconceivable outrage; yet now I see you and your friends walking
alongside of one another's sisters, smoking a short pipe down the
street." "The girls like it," says Nepos. "In my time," replies
Avunculus, "young ladies would have fainted at the bare suggestion of
such an enormity." The dialogue ends as follows:

"NEPOS (_producing short clay_). See here, Uncle. This pipe is
almost coloured. How long do you think I have had it?

"AVUNCULUS. Can't imagine.

"N