George Fitz-Boodle recounts how, as a boy, he was flogged for smoking, and how, at Oxford, smoking among other villainies led to his rustication.  Later his tobacco, combined with insolence to his tobacco-hating colonel, conducted him out of the army into the retirement of civil life; and so on and so on.  There is, of course, an element of exaggeration in all this; but Mr. Fitz-Boodle’s experiences and reflections throw much light on the social history of smoking in the early decades of the nineteenth century.  Mr. Harry Furniss, in the preface to his edition of Thackeray, has an admirably terse and pertinent paragraph on this aspect of the “Fitz-Boodle Papers.”  He says—­“No gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a ‘weed’ in the streets.  Cigarettes were practically unheard of in England, and outside one’s private smoking-room pipes were tabooed.  Men in Society slunk into their smoking-rooms, or, when there was no smoking-room, into the kitchen or servants’ hall, after the domestics had retired.  A smoking-jacket was worn in the place of their ordinary evening coat, and their well-oiled, massive head of hair was protected by a gorgeously decorated smoking-cap.  Thus the odour of tobacco was not brought into the drawing-room.”

The fear of the odour of tobacco-smoke was extraordinary.  Mr. J.C.  Buckmaster in his reminiscences describes the famous debating society at Cogers’ Hall, and says that “after one night at the Cogers’ it took three days on a common to purify your clothes” from the smoke.  The journalists and Bohemians who met at the Cogers were above (or below) the dictates of fashion, and smoking was always a feature of their gatherings.  The “yard of clay” is provided gratis for members, and it is to its almost universal use, says Mr. Peter Rayleigh, in his book on “The Cogers and Fleet Street,” “that Cogers owe their existence in the present quarters.  Once upon a time the Cogers ‘swarmed’ to a well-appointed room, where carpets covered the floors, the chairs were upholstered, and the tables had finely polished marble tops.  The hot pipes and smouldering matches stained the table tops and burnt the carpets, so that they had the option of abandoning either the pipe or the quarters.  Old customs die hard with Cogers, and they stuck to their pipe....  The pipe is a feature in all illustrations of Cogerian meetings.”

The influence of the Court was wholly against smoking.  Both Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort detested it, so tobacco was taboo wherever the Court was.  The late Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived to see the new triumph of tobacco, said that she thought the greatest minor change in social habits which she had witnessed was that in the attitude assumed towards smoking, which, in her youth, “and even later, was, except in certain well-defined circumstances, regarded as little less than a heinous crime.”  Lady Dorothy remarked that “smoking-rooms in country houses were absolutely unknown”—­but