that was not quite correct as we shall see in the experiences of Professor von Holtzendorff, to be mentioned directly—­and that “such gentlemen as wished to smoke after the ladies had gone to bed used, as a matter of course, to go either to the servants’ hall or to the harness-room in the stables, where at night some sort of rough preparation was generally made for their accommodation....  Well do I remember the immense care which devotees of tobacco used to take, when sallying forth in the country to enjoy it, not to allow the faintest whiff of smoke to penetrate into the hall as they lit their cigars at the door.”

In 1845 Dickens wrote:  “I generally take a cigar after dinner when I’m alone.”  The reservation in the last three words may be noted.  In the “Book of Snobs,” Major Wellesley Ponto goes to smoke a cigar in the stables—­Ponto had no smoking-room—­with Lord Gules, who is described as a “very young, short, sandy-haired and tobacco-smoking nobleman, who cannot have left the nursery very long.”  Later, Ponto and Gules “resume smoking operations ... in the now vacant kitchen.”

Even so late as 1861 the attitude towards smoking was still much the same in some quarters.  In that year a German scholar, Professor Franz von Holtzendorff, paid a visit to a country gentleman’s house in Gloucestershire—­Hardwicke Court.  Later he printed an account of his experiences, a translation of which was published in this country in 1878.  When the professor arrived, his host, the first greeting over, at once pointed out to him a secluded apartment—­the one which he thought it most important for a German to know, namely, the smoking-room.  “According to his idea,” continued the professor, “every German has three national characteristics, smoking, singing, and Sabbath-breaking; the first and only idea in which I found him led astray by an abstract theory.”  Later, his hostess, explaining to him the method and routine of life in an English country-house, said that the ladies retired about eleven, while the gentlemen finished their day’s work in the smoking-room—­the secluded apartment—­or enjoyed a cigar at the billiard-table; but a smoke in the billiard-room was only allowed if that room was not near the drawing-room or in the hall close by.  “You must have often been surprised,” she continued, “that we English ladies have such an invincible repugnance to tobacco smoke, but there is no dispensation from our rule of abstinence, except in those rooms which my husband has already pointed out to you.”

The professor, after luncheon, was pressed by the squire—­“who, on any other occasion would never waste time in smoking, and only filled his short clay pipe at the end of his day’s work”—­to come to his smoking-room.  As regards this room the professor drily remarked—­“I thought I had noticed that even the key-hole was stopped up, in order to preserve the ladies’ delicate nerves from every disagreeable sensation.”  After dinner, again, when the ladies had left the table, “the gentlemen passed the bottles of port, sherry, and claret, with the regularity of planets from hand to hand,” but no one dreamed of smoking.  That was reserved for the secluded apartment after the ladies had gone to bed.  Neither host nor guest imagined what a revolution another generation or so would make in these social habits.