But it is time to return to the cigar, and the changing attitude of fashion towards smoking.

There would appear to have been some smokers who disliked the new-fangled cigars.  Angelo seems, from various passages in his “Reminiscences,” to have been a smoker, and to have been very frequently in the company of smokers, yet he could write:  “There are few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that we are again in England, than the superiority of our stage-coaches.  There is something very exhilarating in being carried through the air with rapidity ... considering the rate at which stage-coaches now travel [i.e. in and just before 1830] ... a place on the box or front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat.  But alas! no human enjoyment is free from alloy.  A Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner with his cigar in his mouth, has it in his power to turn the draft of sweet air into a cup of bitterness.”  Perhaps Angelo’s objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by a “Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner,” than to the cigar itself.  Yet, going on to describe a journey to Hastings, sitting “on the roof in front” beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment of dashing along, anecdote and jest going merrily on, “we had the annoyance of a coxcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air which Heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar,” which looks as if his real objection was to cigars, as such.

The fashionable dislike of tobacco-smoke appears in the pages of another descriptive writer—­the once well known N.P.  Willis, the American author of many books of travel and gossip.  In his “Pencillings by the Way,” writing in July 1833, Willis describes the prevalence of smoking in Vienna among all the nationalities that thronged that cosmopolitan capital.  “It is,” he says, “like a fancy ball.  Hungarians, Poles, Croats, Wallachians, Jews, Moldavians, Greeks, Turks, all dressed in their national and stinking costumes, promenade up and down, smoking all, and none exciting the slightest observation.  Every third window is a pipe-shop, and they [presumably the pipes] show, by their splendour and variety, the expensiveness of the passion.  Some of them are marked ‘200 dollars.’  The streets reek with tobacco-smoke.  You never catch a breath of untainted air within the Glacis.  Your hotel, your cafe, your coach, your friend, are all redolent of the same disgusting odour.”  In the following year, describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon’s in Scotland, Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed up and “conversation assumed a merrier cast,” then “coffee and liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more slowly,” and at eleven o’clock there was a general move to the drawing-room.  The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain from Willis’s silence on the subject—­the “disgusting odour” would surely have disturbed him—­that no single member of the large dinner-party dreamed of smoking, or, at all events, attempted to smoke.