d
their smoking-rooms too. Walter Gale, schoolmaster at Mayfield,
Sussex, noted in his Journal under date March 26, 1751: "I went to Mr.
Baker's for the list of scholars, and found him alone in the
smoaking-room; he ordered a pint of mild beer for me, an extraordinary
thing." Gale himself was a regular smoker, and too fond of pints of
ale.

Fielding has immortalized the squire of the mid-eighteenth century in
his picture of that sporting, roaring, swearing, drinking, smoking,
affectionate, irascible, blundering, altogether extraordinary owner of
broad acres, Squire Western. We may shrewdly suspect that the portrait
of Western is somewhat over-coloured, and cannot fairly be taken as
typical; but there is sufficient evidence to show that in some
respects at least--in his enthusiasm for sport and love of ale and
tobacco--Western is representative of the country squires of his day.

In a _World_ of 1755 there is a description of a noisy, hearty,
drinking, devil-may-care country gentleman, in which it is said, "he
makes no scruple to take his pipe and pot at an alehouse with the very
dregs of the people." In a _Connoisseur_ of 1754 a fine gentleman
from London, making a visit in a country-house, is taking his
breakfast with the ladies in the afternoon, when they had their tea,
for, says he, "I should infallibly have perished, had I staied in the
hall, amidst the jargon of toasts and the fumes of tobacco." When
Horace Walpole was staying with his father at his Norfolk
country-seat, Houghton, in September 1737, Gray wrote to him from
Cambridge: "You are in a confusion of wine, and roaring, and hunting,
and tobacco, and, heaven be praised, you too can pretty well bear it."
But Gray had no objection to tobacco. He lived at Cambridge, and the
dons and residents there (as at Oxford), not to speak of the
undergraduates, were as partial to their pipes as the men who went out
from among them to become country parsons, and to share the country
squire's liking for tobacco. Gray wrote to Warton from Cambridge in
April 1749 saying: "Time will settle my conscience, time will
reconcile me to this languid companion (ennui); we shall smoke, we
shall tipple, we shall doze together"--a striking picture of
University life in the sleepy days of the eighteenth century. Gray's
testimony by no means stands alone. In November 1730 Roger North wrote
to his son Montague, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, saying: "I
would be loath you should confi