The more fashionable folk of the Restoration Era and later began to leave off if not to disdain the smoking-habit.  Up to about 1700 smoking had been permitted in the public rooms at Bath, but when Nash then took charge, tobacco was banished.  Public or at least fashionable taste had begun to change, and Nash correctly interpreted and led it.  Sorbiere, who has been quoted in the previous chapter, remarked in 1663 that “People of Quality” did not use tobacco so much as others; and towards the end of the century and in Queen Anne’s time the tendency was for tobacco to go out of fashion.  This did not much affect its general use; but the tendency—­with exceptions, no doubt—­was to restrict the use of tobacco to the clergy, to country squires, to merchants and tradesmen and to the humbler ranks of society—­to limit it, in short, to the middle and lower classes of the social commonwealth as then organized.  In the extraordinary record of inanity which Addison printed as the diary of a citizen in the Spectator of March 4, 1712, the devotion of the worthy retired tradesman to tobacco is emphasized.  This is the kind of thing:  “Monday ...  Hours 10, 11 and 12 Smoaked three Pipes of Virginia ... one o’clock in the afternoon, chid Ralph for mislaying my Tobacco-Box....  Wednesday ...  From One to Two Smoaked a Pipe and a half....  Friday ...  From Four to Six.  Went to the Coffee-house.  Met Mr. Nisby there.  Smoaked several Pipes.”

There was indeed no diminution of tobacco-smoke in the coffee-houses.  A visitor from abroad, Mr. Muralt, a Swiss gentleman, writing about 1696, said that character could be well studied at the coffee-houses.  He was probably not a smoker himself, for he goes on to say that in other respects the coffee-houses are “loathsome, full of smoke like a guardroom, and as much crowded.”  He further observed that it was common to see the clergy of London in coffee-houses and even in taverns, with pipes in their mouths.  A native witness of about the same date, Ned Ward, writes sneeringly in his “London Spy,” 1699, of the interior of the coffee-house.  He saw “some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jingling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot, or a boatswain’s cabin....  We each of us stuck in our mouths a pipe of sotweed, and now began to look about us.”  Ward’s contemporary, Tom Brown, took a different tone:  he wrote of “Tobacco, Cole and the Protestant Religion, the three great blessings of life!”—­as strange a jumble as one could wish for.

Even children seem to have smoked sometimes in the coffee-houses.  Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary, tells a strange story.  He declares that, one evening which he spent with his brother at Garraway’s Coffee-house, February 20, 1702, he was surprised to see his brother’s “sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco and smoke it as audfarandly as a man of three score; after that a second and a third pipe without the least concern, as it is said to have done above a year ago.”  A child of two years of age smoking three pipes in succession is a picture a little difficult to accept as true.  As this is the only reference to tobacco in the whole of his “Diary,” it is not likely that Thoresby was himself a smoker.