Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

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.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

One of the most distinguished of Victorian men of letters, John Ruskin, was a great hater of tobacco. Notwithstanding this, he sent Carlyle—an inveterate smoker—a box of cigars in February 1865. In his letter of acknowledgment Carlyle wrote—"Dear Ruskin, you have sent me a magnificent Box of Cigars; for which what can I say in answer? It makes me both sad and glad. Ay de mi

'We are such stuff,
Gone with a puff—
Then think, and smoke Tobacco!'"

In the later years of his life, spent at Brantwood, Ruskin's guests found that smoking was not allowed even after dinner.

Another and greater Victorian, Gladstone, was also a non-smoker. He is said, however, on one occasion, when King Edward as Prince of Wales dined with him in Downing Street, to have toyed with a cigarette out of courtesy to his illustrious guest.

It was in the latter years of his life that Tennyson told Sir William Harcourt one day that his morning pipe after breakfast was the best in the day—an opinion, by the way, to which many less distinguished smokers would subscribe—when Sir William laughingly replied, "The earliest pipe of half-awakened bards."

The companion burlesque line, "The earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye" appears, with one from Homer and one from Virgil, at the head of Arthur Sidgwick's poem in Greek Iambics, in "Echoes from the Oxford Magazine," 1890.

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