estrictions. A particularly absurd rule that maintains its ground
here and there, is that which forbids smoking in the library of a
club. What more appropriate place could there be for the thoughtful
consumption of tobacco than among the books? But after due allowance
has been made for a few minor restrictions of this kind, the fact
remains that smoking has triumphed socially all along the line in
Clubland. We have travelled far from the days when a committee man
could declare that "No Gentleman smoked," to the time when, for
example, the large smoking-room at Brooks's is one of the finest rooms
in one of the most famous and exclusive of clubs. This splendid room
in the eighteenth-century days of gambling was the "Grand Subscription
Room"--the gambling room of Georgian times. It still retains two of
the old gaming tables. Now this magnificent apartment, with its
splendid barrelled ceiling, which a well-known architectural writer,
Mr. Stanley C. Ramsey, A.R.I.B.A., describes as "probably the finest
room of its kind in London," is the temple of Saint Nicotine. The
strangers' smoking-room in the same club, formerly the dining-room,
is another beautiful and delightfully decorated apartment. Similar
transformations have been witnessed in other clubs.

Barry's original plan for the Travellers' Club, erected in 1832, shows
no smoking-room on the ground floor. It was probably some inconvenient
apartment of no account. The early "Travellers" did smoke, for
Theodore Hook, satirizing them and the club rule that no person was
eligible as a member who had not travelled out of the British Islands
to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line,
wrote:

_The travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so
cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the
plains of Moselai,
The world for them has nothing new, they have explored
all parts of it;
And now they are club-footed! and they sit and look at
charts of it._

The present-day smoking-room at the Travellers' is a noble apartment,
which was originally the coffee-room. It occupies the whole of the
ground-floor front to the gardens of Carlton House Terrace, and is
divided into three bays by the projection of square piers.

Another sign of the complete change which has come over the attitude
of most folk towards tobacco is to be seen in the permission of
smoking at meetings of committees and councils,