Social Progress of Tobacco 85 



teenth century, has the consumption again touched 

 this figure. All the tobacco used was of the roll or 

 cake kind, Varinas, Knaster, and Spanish being the 

 favourite brands. The latter cost 8 shillings a pound 

 and Virginia 5 shillings. 



This was the heyday of tobacco, the halcyon time 

 of the pipe ; Nicotia reached its zenith and began to 

 decline. It had attained a popularity it had never 

 known before, and to which the present age is only 

 now approximating. Its very popularity caused its 

 downfall. What the thunders of priests, the logic of 

 philosophers, the warning of physicians, the satire 

 of wits and the excise duties of kings had not been 

 able to accomplish, Fashion performed single-handed. 

 The laws of Fashion are aimed at singularity ; to be 

 unique, to be dififerent at all costs from the common 

 people, is the aim of Fashion's constant inconstancy. 

 Smoking had become common ; the pipe was no longer 

 the badge of the beau ; the habit was practised by the 

 very lowest classes of society. And society, with a big 

 ' S,' repulsed for its vulgarity the practice it had first 

 welcomed for its singularity. The institution of 

 French habits and manners as the standard of social 

 life at the beginning of the eighteenth century — the 

 maxim ' They do things better in France ' is Sterne's 

 — was a powerful factor in the degradation of smok- 

 ing. In France snufT had always been preferred to 

 smoking, and Georgian England, repudiating smoking 

 for its popularity, began to snufT. In Pall Mall, the 

 fashionable lounge, smoking was forbidden. Beau 

 Nash enacted similar laws at Bath. Forgetting that 

 they had ever enjoyed a pipe, the higher classes 



