It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of masculine friendship and good talk.  Your cigar will do for drummers, your cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the ripened, boneset votary nothing but a briar will suffice.  Away with meerschaum, calabash, cob, and clay:  they have their purpose in the inscrutable order of things, like crossing sweepers and presidents of women’s clubs; but when Damon and Pythias meet to talk things over, well-caked briars are in order.  Cigars are all right in fiction:  for Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine when they visit the famous Divan in Rupert Street.  It was Leigh Hunt, in the immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so little read, alas!), who uttered the finest plea for cigars that this language affords, but I will wager not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it.

The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an etiquette, a usage, and traditions of its own, which a more hurried and hygienic age has discarded.  It was the height of courtesy to ask your friend to let you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three or four mouthfuls of smoke.  This afforded opportunity for a gracious exchange of compliments.  “Will it please you to impart your whiff?” was the accepted phrase.  And then, having savored his mixture, you would have said:  “In truth, a very excellent leaf,” offering your own with proper deprecations.  This, and many other excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson’s noble book “The Social History of Smoking,” which should be prayer book and breviary to every smoker con amore.

But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace and companion of lonely vigils.  We all look back with tender affection on the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some walking trip, some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained counters of some remote alehouse.  These are the memories that are bittersweet beyond the compass of halting words.  Never again perhaps will we throw care over the hedge and stride with Mifflin down the Banbury Road, filling the air with laughter and the fumes of Murray’s Mellow.  But even deeper is the tribute we pay to the sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened cutty that has been with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a hundred weary dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen faltered in the hand.  Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace.  Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your pipe will never fail you.

How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite!  I cannot even read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers itching to light up and puff with him.  My mouth has been sore and baked a hundred times after an evening with Elia.  The rogue simply can’t help talking about tobacco, and I strike a match for every essay.  God bless him and his dear “Orinooko!” Or Parson Adams in “Joseph Andrews”—­he lights a pipe on every page!