Social Progress of Tobacco 91 



What are accounted faults in ordinary men are 

 virtues in heroes, and smoking becoming fashionable, 

 soon came into its own again, under martial escort. 



The increasing practice of smoking met with con- 

 siderable social opposition ; it was regarded as an 

 innovation. So completely was it forgotten that a 

 century and a half before smoking had been universal 

 in England, among men, women and children, from 

 the highest to the lowest in the land, that Thackeray 

 in his ' Fitzboodle Papers ' wrote : ' What is this 

 smoking, that it should be considered a crime ? I 

 believe in my heart that women are jealous of it as 

 of a rival. The fact is, that the cigar is a rival to the 

 ladies, and their conqueror too. Do you suppose 

 you will conquer? Look over the wide world and 

 see that your adversary has overcome it. Germany 

 has been puffing for three-score years ; France smokes 

 to a man. Do you think you can keep the enemy out 

 of England?' The italicised passages show clearly 

 that Thackeray, with the rest of his countrymen, 

 forgot, if he ever knew, that in the golden reign of 

 Elizabeth, the stormy seventeenth century, and until 

 the reign of Anne, all England smoked, and that in 

 the early years of its introduction ' to drink tobacco 

 with a grace ' was the necessary accomplishment of 

 every gentleman. The odium and disgrace in which 

 smoking had Iain for a century and a half caused 

 its former conquests and position to be forgotten. 

 Hence Thackeray was more happy in prophesying 

 the coming triumph, in reality the renascence, of 

 tobacco. ' I for my part do not despair to see a 

 Bishop lolling out of the Athenaeum with a cheroot 



