f Kew, but on leaving Kew became a wine-merchant in Soho.
While at Kew he is said to have kept cigars under the pulpit, where,
he said, the temperature was exactly right.

At first even cigar-smoking was confined to comparatively few persons,
and the social prejudice against tobacco continued unabated. Thackeray
significantly makes Rawdon Crawley a smoker--the action of "Vanity
Fair" takes place in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
The original smoking-room of the Athenaeum Club, which was founded in
1824, the present building being erected in 1830, was a miserable
little room, Dr. Hawtree, on behalf of the committee, announcing that
"no gentleman smoked." The Oriental Club, when built in 1826-27,
contained no smoking-room at all.

Sir Walter Scott often smoked cigars, though he seems to have regarded
it in the light of an indulgence to be half-apologized for. In his
"Journal," July 4, 1829, he noted--"When I had finished my bit of
dinner, and was in a quiet way smoking my cigar over a glass of negus,
Adam Ferguson comes with a summons to attend him to the Justice
Clerk's, where, it seems, I was engaged. I was totally out of case to
attend his summons, redolent as I was of tobacco. But I am vexed at
the circumstance. It looks careless, and, what is worse, affected; and
the Justice is an old friend moreover." Tobacco in any form was
suspect. A man might smoke a cigar, but he must not take the odour
into the drawing-room of even an old friend.

A few years earlier, in November 1825, Scott had written in his
"Journal" that after dinner he usually smoked a couple of cigars which
operated as a sedative--

_Just to drive the cold winter away,
And drown the fatigues of the day._

"I smoked a good deal," he continued, "about twenty years ago when at
Ashestiel; but, coming down one morning to the parlour, I found, as
the room was small and confined, that the smell was unpleasant, and
laid aside the use of the _Nicotian weed_ for many years; but was
again led to use it by the example of my son, a hussar officer, and my
son-in-law, an Oxford student. I could lay it aside to-morrow; I laugh
at the dominion of custom in this and many things.

"_We make the giants first, and then_ do not _kill them._"

Scott's remark that Lockhart smoked when an Oxford student rather
discredits Archdeacon's Denison's statement, quoted in the preceding
chapter, that smoking was very generally unknown in Oxford in 1