th them till two in the
morning over punch and Burgundy amid the fumes of tobacco--but such a
way of life did not suit his sickly constitution, and he soon
withdrew. It is not likely that he smoked.

The attractions and the atmosphere of provincial coffee-houses were
much the same as those of the London resorts. A German gentleman who
visited Cambridge in July and August 1710 remarked that in the Greeks'
coffee-house in that town, in the morning and after 3 o'clock in the
afternoon, you could meet the chief professors and doctors, who read
the papers over a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco. One of the
learned doctors took the German visitor to the weekly meeting of a
Music Club in one of the colleges. Here were assembled bachelors,
masters and doctors of music of the University--no professionals were
employed--who performed vocal and instrumental music to their mutual
gratification, though, apparently, not to the satisfaction of the
visitor, who records his opinion that the music was "very poor." "It
lasted," he says, "till 11 P.M., there was besides smoking and
drinking of wine, though we did not do much of either. At 11 the
reckoning was called for, and each person paid 2s."

There was clearly no prejudice against smoking at Cambridge. Abraham
de la Pryme notes in his diary for the year 1694 that when it was
rumoured in May of that year that a certain house opposite one of the
colleges was haunted, strange noises being heard in it, several
scholars of the college said, "Come, fetch us a good pitcher of ale,
and tobacco and pipes, and wee'l sit up and see this spirit." The ale
was duly provided, the pipes were lit, and the courageous smokers
spent the night in the house, sitting "singing and drinking there till
morning," but, alas! they neither saw nor heard anything.

Smoking was still popular also at Oxford. A. D'Anvers, in her
"Academia; or the Humours of Oxford," 1691, speaks, indeed, of
undergraduates who, when they could not get tobacco, did much as the
parson of Thornton is reputed to have done, as already related in
Chapter II, _i.e._ they condescended to smoke fragments of mats. With
this may be compared the macaronic lines:

_At si_
Mundungus _desit: tum non_ funcare _recusant_
Brown-Paper _tosta, vel quod fit arundine_ bed-mat.

Tobacco, in Queen Anne's time, still maintained its hold over large
classes of the people, and was still dominant in most places