At the coffee-house entrance was the bar presided over by the predecessors of the modern barmaids—­grumbled at in a Spectator as “idols,” who there received homage from their admirers, and who paid more attention to customers who flirted with them than to more sober-minded visitors.  They are described by Tom Brown as “a charming Phillis or two, who invited you by their amorous glances into their smoaky territories.”  Admission cost little.  There you might see—­

    Grave wits, who, spending farthings four,
    Sit, smoke, and warm themselves an hour.

The allusions in the Spectator to smoking in the coffee-houses are frequent.  “Sometimes,” says Addison, in his title character in the first number of the paper, “sometimes I smoak a pipe at Child’s and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-man, over-hear the conversation of every table in the room.”  And here is a vignette of coffee-house life in 1714 from No. 568 of the Spectator:  “I was yesterday in a coffee-house not far from the Royal Exchange, where I observed three persons in close conference over a pipe of tobacco; upon which, having filled one for my own use, I lighted it at the little wax candle that stood before them; and after having thrown in two or three whiffs amongst them, sat down and made one of the company.  I need not tell my reader, that lighting a man’s pipe at the same candle is looked upon among brother-smoakers as an overture to conversation and friendship.”  From the very beginning smoking has induced and fostered a spirit of comradeship.

Sir Roger de Coverley, as a typical country squire, was naturally a smoker.  He presented his friend the Spectator, the silent gentleman, with a tobacco-stopper made by Will Wimble, telling him that Will had been busy all the early part of the winter in turning great quantities of them, and had made a present of one to every gentleman in the county who had good principles and smoked.  When Sir Roger was driving in a hackney-coach he called upon the coachman to stop, and when the man came to the window asked him if he smoked.  While Sir Roger’s companion was wondering “what this would end in,” the knight bid his Jehu to “stop by the way at any good Tobacconist’s, and take in a Roll of their best Virginia.”  And when he visited Squire’s near Gray’s Inn Gate, his first act was to call for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a dish of coffee, a newspaper and a wax candle; and all the boys in the coffee-room ran to serve him.  The wax candle was of course a convenience in matchless days for pipe-lighting.  The “paper of tobacco” was the equivalent of what is now vulgarly called a “screw” of tobacco.

The practice of selling tobacco in small paper packets was common, and moralists naturally had something to say about the fate of an author’s work, when the leaves of his books found their ultimate use as wrappers for the weed.  “For as no mortal author,” says Addison, “in the ordinary fate and vicissitude of things, knows to what use his works may, some time or other, be applied, a man may often meet with very celebrated names in a paper of tobacco.  I have lighted my pipe more than once with the writings of a prelate.”