eed not tell my reader, that lighting a man's pipe at the
same candle is looked upon among brother-smoakers as an overture to
conversation and friendship." From the very beginning smoking has
induced and fostered a spirit of comradeship.

Sir Roger de Coverley, as a typical country squire, was naturally a
smoker. He presented his friend the Spectator, the silent gentleman,
with a tobacco-stopper made by Will Wimble, telling him that Will had
been busy all the early part of the winter in turning great quantities
of them, and had made a present of one to every gentleman in the
county who had good principles and smoked. When Sir Roger was driving
in a hackney-coach he called upon the coachman to stop, and when the
man came to the window asked him if he smoked. While Sir Roger's
companion was wondering "what this would end in," the knight bid his
Jehu to "stop by the way at any good Tobacconist's, and take in a Roll
of their best Virginia." And when he visited Squire's near Gray's Inn
Gate, his first act was to call for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco,
a dish of coffee, a newspaper and a wax candle; and all the boys in
the coffee-room ran to serve him. The wax candle was of course a
convenience in matchless days for pipe-lighting. The "paper of
tobacco" was the equivalent of what is now vulgarly called a "screw"
of tobacco.

The practice of selling tobacco in small paper packets was common, and
moralists naturally had something to say about the fate of an author's
work, when the leaves of his books found their ultimate use as
wrappers for the weed. "For as no mortal author," says Addison, "in
the ordinary fate and vicissitude of things, knows to what use his
works may, some time or other, be applied, a man may often meet with
very celebrated names in a paper of tobacco. I have lighted my pipe
more than once with the writings of a prelate."

Addison and Steele smoked, and so did Prior, who seems to have had a
weakness at times for low company. After spending an evening with
Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope and Swift, it is recorded that he would go
"and smoke a pipe, and drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier
and his wife, in Long Acre, before he went to bed." Some of Prior's
poems, as Thackeray caustically remarks, smack not a little of the
conversation of his Long Acre friends. Pope for awhile attended the
symposium at Button's coffee-house, where Addison was the centre of
the coterie--he describes himself as sitting wi