Cheroots seem to have been known somewhat earlier.  The earliest mention of them is dated about 1670.  Sir James Murray, in the great Oxford Dictionary, gives the following interesting extract from an unpublished MS. relating to India, written between 1669 and 1679:  “The Poore Sort of Inhabitants vizt. yet Gentues, Mallabars, &c., Smoke theire Tobacco after a very meane, but I judge Original manner, Onely ye leafe rowled up, and light one end, holdinge ye other between their lips ... this is called a bunko, and by ye Portugals a Cheroota.”  The condemnation of cheroot-or cigar-smoking as a mean method of taking tobacco has an odd look in the light of modern habits and customs.

The use of cigars in this country began to come in early in the last century; and by at least 1830 they were being freely, if privately, smoked.  It is probable that the reduction of the duty on cigars from 18s. to 9s. a lb., in 1829, had its effect in making cigars more popular.  Croker, in 1831, commenting on Johnson’s saying that smoking had gone out, said:  “The taste for smoking, however, has revived, probably from the military habits of Europe during the French wars; but instead of the sober sedentary pipe, the ambulatory cigar is chiefly used.”  Croker’s shrewd suggestion was probably not far wide of the truth.  It is quite likely, if not highly probable, that the revival of smoking in the shape of the cigar was directly connected with the experiences of British officers in Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular War.

One of the earliest cigar-smokers must have been that remarkable clergyman, the Rev. Charles Caleb Colton, whose “Lacon,” published in 1820, was once popular.  Colton was in succession Rector of Tiverton and Vicar of Kew, but on leaving Kew became a wine-merchant in Soho.  While at Kew he is said to have kept cigars under the pulpit, where, he said, the temperature was exactly right.

At first even cigar-smoking was confined to comparatively few persons, and the social prejudice against tobacco continued unabated.  Thackeray significantly makes Rawdon Crawley a smoker—­the action of “Vanity Fair” takes place in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.  The original smoking-room of the Athenaeum Club, which was founded in 1824, the present building being erected in 1830, was a miserable little room, Dr. Hawtree, on behalf of the committee, announcing that “no gentleman smoked.”  The Oriental Club, when built in 1826-27, contained no smoking-room at all.

Sir Walter Scott often smoked cigars, though he seems to have regarded it in the light of an indulgence to be half-apologized for.  In his “Journal,” July 4, 1829, he noted—­“When I had finished my bit of dinner, and was in a quiet way smoking my cigar over a glass of negus, Adam Ferguson comes with a summons to attend him to the Justice Clerk’s, where, it seems, I was engaged.  I was totally out of case to attend his summons, redolent as I was of tobacco.  But I am vexed at the circumstance.  It looks careless, and, what is worse, affected; and the Justice is an old friend moreover.”  Tobacco in any form was suspect.  A man might smoke a cigar, but he must not take the odour into the drawing-room of even an old friend.