Addison and Steele smoked, and so did Prior, who seems to have had a weakness at times for low company.  After spending an evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope and Swift, it is recorded that he would go “and smoke a pipe, and drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier and his wife, in Long Acre, before he went to bed.”  Some of Prior’s poems, as Thackeray caustically remarks, smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends.  Pope for awhile attended the symposium at Button’s coffee-house, where Addison was the centre of the coterie—­he describes himself as sitting with them till two in the morning over punch and Burgundy amid the fumes of tobacco—­but such a way of life did not suit his sickly constitution, and he soon withdrew.  It is not likely that he smoked.

The attractions and the atmosphere of provincial coffee-houses were much the same as those of the London resorts.  A German gentleman who visited Cambridge in July and August 1710 remarked that in the Greeks’ coffee-house in that town, in the morning and after 3 o’clock in the afternoon, you could meet the chief professors and doctors, who read the papers over a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco.  One of the learned doctors took the German visitor to the weekly meeting of a Music Club in one of the colleges.  Here were assembled bachelors, masters and doctors of music of the University—­no professionals were employed—­who performed vocal and instrumental music to their mutual gratification, though, apparently, not to the satisfaction of the visitor, who records his opinion that the music was “very poor.”  “It lasted,” he says, “till 11 P.M., there was besides smoking and drinking of wine, though we did not do much of either.  At 11 the reckoning was called for, and each person paid 2s.”

There was clearly no prejudice against smoking at Cambridge.  Abraham de la Pryme notes in his diary for the year 1694 that when it was rumoured in May of that year that a certain house opposite one of the colleges was haunted, strange noises being heard in it, several scholars of the college said, “Come, fetch us a good pitcher of ale, and tobacco and pipes, and wee’l sit up and see this spirit.”  The ale was duly provided, the pipes were lit, and the courageous smokers spent the night in the house, sitting “singing and drinking there till morning,” but, alas! they neither saw nor heard anything.

Smoking was still popular also at Oxford.  A. D’Anvers, in her “Academia; or the Humours of Oxford,” 1691, speaks, indeed, of undergraduates who, when they could not get tobacco, did much as the parson of Thornton is reputed to have done, as already related in Chapter II, i.e. they condescended to smoke fragments of mats.  With this may be compared the macaronic lines: 

                                    At si
    Mundungus desit:  tum non funcare recusant
    Brown-Paper tosta, vel quod fit arundine bed-mat.