, Sorbiere, who visited London in 1663, declared
that the English were naturally lazy and spent half their time in
taking tobacco. They smoked after meals, he observed, and conversed
for a long time. "There is scarce a day passes," he wrote, "but a
Tradesman goes to the Ale-house or Tavern to smoke with some of his
Friends, and therefore Public Houses are numerous here, and Business
goes on but slowly in the Shops"; but, curiously enough, he makes no
mention of coffee-houses. A little later they were too common and too
much frequented to be overlooked. An English writer on thrift in 1676
said that it was customary for a "mechanic tradesman" to go to the
coffee-house or ale-house in the morning to drink his morning's
draught, and there he would spend twopence and consume an hour in
smoking and talking, spending several hours of the evening in similar
fashion.

Country gentlemen smoked just as much as town mechanics and tradesmen.
In 1688 Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, wrote to Mr. Thomas
Cullum, of Hawsted Place, desiring "to be remembered by the witty
smoakers of Hawsted." A later Cullum, Sir John, published in 1784 a
"History and Antiquities of Hawsted," and in describing Hawsted Place,
which was rebuilt about 1570, says that there was a small apartment
called the smoking-room--"a name," he says, "it acquired probably soon
after it was built; and which it retained with good reason, as long as
it stood." I should like to know on what authority Sir John Cullum
could have made the assertion that the room was called the
smoking-room from so early a date as the end of the sixteenth century.
No mention in print of a smoking-room has been found for the purposes
of the Oxford Dictionary earlier than 1689. In Shadwell's "Bury Fair"
of that date Lady Fantast says to her husband, Mr. Oldwit, who loves
to tell of his early meetings with Ben Jonson and other literary
heroes of a bygone day, "While all the Beau Monde, as my daughter
says, are with us in the drawing-room, you have none but ill-bred,
witless drunkards with you in your smoking-room." As Mr. Oldwit
himself, in another scene of the same play, says to his friends,
"We'll into my smoking-room and sport about a brimmer," there was
probably some excuse for his wife's remark. These country
smoking-rooms were known in later days as stone-parlours, the floor
being flagged for safety's sake; and the "stone-parlour" in many a
squire's house was the scene of much convivialit