and corner,
are both smoking long pipes. Apparently they are discussing the taking
of Portobello by Admiral Vernon in 1739 with only six ships; for the
barber is illustrating his talk by pointing with his twisted pipe-stem
to six fragments which he has broken from the stem and arranged on the
table in the shape of a crescent. In the frontispiece which Hogarth
drew in 1762 for Garrick's farce of "The Farmer's Return from London,"
the worthy farmer, seated in his great chair, holds out a large mug in
one hand to be filled with ale, while the other supports his long
pipe, which he is smoking with evident enjoyment.

Hogarth himself was a confirmed pipe-lover. When he and Thornhill and
their three companions set out from Gravesend for the final stage, up
the river, of their famous "Five Days Peregrination," we are told that
they hired a boat with clean straw, and laid in a bottle of wine,
pipes, tobacco, and light, and so came merrily up the river. The
arm-chair in which Hogarth was wont to sit and smoke is still
preserved in his house at Chiswick, which has been bought and
preserved as a memorial of the moralist-painter; and in the garden of
the house may still be seen the remains of the mulberry tree under
which Mr. Austin Dobson suggests that Hogarth and Fielding may have
sat and smoked their pipes together in the days when George was
King.

VIII

SMOKING UNFASHIONABLE (_continued_): LATER GEORGIAN DAYS

Says the Pipe to the Snuff-box, I can't understand
What the ladies and gentlemen see in your face,
That you are in fashion all over the land,
And I am so much fallen into disgrace.

WILLIAM COWPER.
(From a letter to the Rev. John Newton, May 28, 1782.)

"Smoking has gone out," said Johnson in talk at St. Andrews, one day
in 1773. "To be sure," he continued, "it is a shocking thing, blowing
smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes and noses,
and having the same thing done to us; yet I cannot account why a thing
which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from
total vacuity, should have gone out." Johnson did not trouble himself
to think of how much the vagaries of fashion account for stranger
vicissitudes in manners and customs than the rise and fall of the
smoking-habit; nor did he probably foresee how slowly but surely the
taste for smoking, even in the circles most influenced by fashion,
would revive. Boswell tells us that although the