ome drinking, some smoking, others
jingling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot,
or a boatswain's cabin.... We each of us stuck in our mouths a pipe of
sotweed, and now began to look about us." Ward's contemporary, Tom
Brown, took a different tone: he wrote of "Tobacco, Cole and the
Protestant Religion, the three great blessings of life!"--as strange a
jumble as one could wish for.

Even children seem to have smoked sometimes in the coffee-houses.
Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary, tells a strange story. He
declares that, one evening which he spent with his brother at
Garraway's Coffee-house, February 20, 1702, he was surprised to see
his brother's "sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of
tobacco and smoke it as _audfarandly_ as a man of three score; after
that a second and a third pipe without the least concern, as it is
said to have done above a year ago." A child of two years of age
smoking three pipes in succession is a picture a little difficult to
accept as true. As this is the only reference to tobacco in the whole
of his "Diary," it is not likely that Thoresby was himself a smoker.

At the coffee-house entrance was the bar presided over by the
predecessors of the modern barmaids--grumbled at in a _Spectator_ as
"idols," who there received homage from their admirers, and who paid
more attention to customers who flirted with them than to more
sober-minded visitors. They are described by Tom Brown as "a charming
Phillis or two, who invited you by their amorous glances into their
smoaky territories." Admission cost little. There you might see--

_Grave wits, who, spending farthings four,
Sit, smoke, and warm themselves an hour._

The allusions in the _Spectator_ to smoking in the coffee-houses are
frequent. "Sometimes," says Addison, in his title character in the
first number of the paper, "sometimes I smoak a pipe at Child's and
whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the _Post-man_, over-hear the
conversation of every table in the room." And here is a vignette of
coffee-house life in 1714 from No. 568 of the _Spectator_: "I was
yesterday in a coffee-house not far from the Royal Exchange, where I
observed three persons in close conference over a pipe of tobacco;
upon which, having filled one for my own use, I lighted it at the
little wax candle that stood before them; and after having thrown in
two or three whiffs amongst them, sat down and made one of the
company. I n