I am certain of one
thing: it is to the cigarette that the temperate habits of the
twentieth century are due. Nicotine knocked port and claret out in
the second round. The acclimatisation of the cigarette in England
only dates from the "seventies." As a child I remember that the
only form of tobacco indulged in by the people that I knew was the
cigar. A cigarette was considered an effeminate foreign
importation; a pipe was unspeakably vulgar.
In my mother's young days before her marriage, the old hard-
drinking habits of the Regency and of the eighteenth century still
persisted. At Woburn Abbey it was the custom for the trusted old
family butler to make his nightly report to my grandmother in the
drawing-room. "The gentlemen have had a good deal to-night; it
might be as well for the young ladies to retire," or "The
gentlemen have had very little to-night," was announced according
to circumstances by this faithful family retainer. Should the
young girls be packed off upstairs, they liked standing on an
upper gallery of the staircase to watch the shouting, riotous
crowd issuing from the dining-room.
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