often did, with a girl without a penny.  No fellow can fall in love when he has continually a pipe in his mouth; and if he ever feels inclined to when it would be imprudent, why he lights his pipe, and very soon smokes the idea of such folly out of his head.  Not so when I was of your age.  Besides a few old farmers, churchwardens, and overseers, and such, nobody then ever smoked but labourers and the lower orders—­cads as you now say.  Smoking was thought vulgar.  Young men never smoked at all.  To smoke in the presence of a lady was an inconceivable outrage; yet now I see you and your friends walking alongside of one another’s sisters, smoking a short pipe down the street.”  “The girls like it,” says Nepos.  “In my time,” replies Avunculus, “young ladies would have fainted at the bare suggestion of such an enormity.”  The dialogue ends as follows: 

  “NEPOS (producing short clay).  See here, Uncle.  This pipe is
  almost coloured.  How long do you think I have had it?

  “AVUNCULUS.  Can’t imagine.

  “NEPOS.  Only three weeks.

  “AVUNCULUS.  Good boy!”

In the same “Pocket-Book” one of the ideals of a wife by a bachelor is—­“To approve of smoking all over the house”; while one of the ideals of a husband by a spinster is—­“Not to smoke, or use a latch-key.”  Mr. Punch’s prelections, of course, are not to be taken too seriously.  They all necessarily have the exaggeration of caricature; but at the same time they are all significant, and for the social historian are invaluable.

Tobacco-smoking was advancing victoriously all along the line.  Absurd old conventions and ridiculous restrictions had to give way or were broken through in every direction.  The compartments for smokers on railway trains, at first provided sparsely and grudgingly, became more and more numerous.  The practice of smoking out of doors, which the early Victorians held in particular abhorrence, became common—­at least so far as cigars and cigarettes were concerned.  Lady Dorothy Nevill, whose memory covered so large a part of the nineteenth century, said, in the “Leaves” from her note-book which was published in 1907, that to smoke in Hyde Park, even up to comparatively recent years, was looked upon as absolutely unpardonable; while smoking anywhere with a lady would, in the earlier days, have been classed as an almost disgraceful social crime.  The first gentleman of whom Lady Dorothy heard as having been seen smoking a cigar in the Park was the Duke of Sutherland, and the lady who told her spoke of it as if she had been present at an earthquake!  Pipes were (and are) still looked at askance in many places where the smoking of cigars and cigarettes is freely allowed, and fashion frowned on the pipe in street or Park.