If smoking had died out at Oxford its decline must have been rapid.  When a certain young John James was an undergraduate of Queen’s, 1778 to 1781, he and his correspondents spoke severely of the “miserable condition of Fellows who (under the liberal pretence of educating youth) spend half their lives in smoking tobacco and reading the newspapers.”  About 1800 the older or more old-fashioned of the Fellows at New College, “not liking the then newly introduced luxury of Turkey carpets,” says Mr. G.V.  Cox, in his “Recollections of Oxford,” 1868, “often adjourned to smoke their pipe in a little room opposite to the Senior Common-room, now appropriated to other uses, but then kept as a smoking-room.”  A Mr. Rhodes, a one-time Fellow of Worcester College, who was elected Esquire Bedel in Medicine and Arts in 1792, had a very peculiar way of enjoying his tobacco.  Mr. Cox says:  “On one occasion, when I had to call upon him, I found him drinking rum and water, and enjoying (what he called his luxury) the fumes of tobacco, not through a pipe or in the shape of a cigar, but burnt in a dish!”

Smoking had certainly not died out at Cambridge, even at the time when Denison was at Oxford.  According to the “Gradus ad Cantabrigium,” 1824, the Cambridge smart man’s habit was to dine in the evening “at his own rooms, or at those of a friend, and afterwards blows a cloud, puffs at a segar, and drinks copiously.”  The spelling of “segar” shows that cigars were then somewhat of a novelty.

When Tennyson was an undergraduate at Cambridge, 1828-30, he and his companions all smoked.  At the meetings of the “Apostles”—­the little group of friends which included the future Laureate—­“much coffee was drunk, much tobacco smoked.”  Dons smoked as well as undergraduates.  At Queens’, the Combination-room in Tennyson’s time had still a sanded floor, and the “table was set handsomely forth with long ‘churchwardens’”—­as the poet told Palgrave when the two visited Cambridge in 1859.  George Pryme, in his “Autobiographic Recollections,” 1870, states that in 1800 “smoking was allowed in the Trinity Combination-room after supper in the twelve days of Christmas, when a few old men availed themselves of it,” which looks as if tobacco were not very popular just then at Trinity.  With the wine, pipes and the large silver tobacco-box were laid on the table.  Porson, when asked for an inscription for the box, suggested “+To bakcho+.”  Pryme says that among the undergraduates, of whom he was one, tobacco had no favour, and “an attempt of Mr. Ginkell, son of Lord Athlone ... to introduce smoking at his own wine-parties failed, although he had the prestige of being a hat-fellow-commoner.”