y, the expensiveness of
the passion. Some of them are marked '200 dollars.' The streets reek
with tobacco-smoke. You never catch a breath of untainted air within
the Glacis. Your hotel, your cafe, your coach, your friend, are all
redolent of the same disgusting odour." In the following year,
describing a large dinner-party at the Duke of Gordon's in Scotland,
Willis says that when the ladies left the table, the gentlemen closed
up and "conversation assumed a merrier cast," then "coffee and
liqueurs were brought in, when the wines began to be circulated more
slowly," and at eleven o'clock there was a general move to the
drawing-room. The dinner began at seven, so the guests had been four
hours at table; but smoking is not mentioned, and it is quite certain
from Willis's silence on the subject--the "disgusting odour" would
surely have disturbed him--that no single member of the large
dinner-party dreamed of smoking, or, at all events, attempted to
smoke.

By 1830 smoking had so far "come in" again that a considerable
proportion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers.
Macaulay has drawn for us the not very attractive picture of the
smoking-room of the old House of Commons--before the fire of 1834--in
a letter to his sister dated in the summer of 1831. "I have left Sir
Francis Burdett on his legs," he wrote, "and repaired to the
smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables
covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is
generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a
perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen (tell it not to the West
Indians), Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not
believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open,
and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself."
In July 1832 he again dated a letter to his sisters from the House of
Commons smoking-room. "I am writing here," he says, "at eleven at
night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres ... with the smell
of tobacco in my nostrils.... Reject not my letter, though it is
redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room--

_The room,--but I think I'll describe it in rhyme,
That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime.
The smell of tobacco was always the same:
But the chloride was bought since the cholera came."_

The mention of pigtail shows that the House contained pipe- as well as
cigar-sm