is the earliest reference I have found to cigarette-smoking in England; but it is possible that by “cigarettes” Dickens meant not what we now know as such, but simply small cigars.  Mr. H.M.  Hyndman, in his “Record of an Adventurous Life,” says that when he was living as a pupil, about the year 1860, with the Rector of Oxburgh, his fellow-pupils included “Edward Abbott of Salonica, who, poor fellow, was battered to pieces by the Turks with iron staves torn from palings at the beginning of the Turco-Servian War.  Cigarette-smoking, now so popular, was then almost unknown, and Abbott, who always smoked the finest Turkish tobacco which he rolled up into cigarettes for himself, was the first devotee of this habit I encountered.”

Fairholt, in his book on “Tobacco,” which was published in 1859, mentions cigarettes as being smoked in Spain and South and Central America, but makes no reference to their use in this country.

The late Lady Dorothy Nevill said that although cigarettes are a modern invention, she believed that they already existed in a slightly different form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “when old Peninsular officers used to smoke tobacco rolled up tight in a piece of paper.  They called this a papelito, and I fancy it was much the same thing as a cigarette.”  But if this were so, the habit must have died out long before the cigarette, as we now know it, came into vogue.

It may fairly be concluded, I think, that although about 1860 there may have been an occasional cigarette-smoker in England, like the Edward Abbott of Mr. Hyndman’s reminiscences, yet it was not until a little later date that the small paper-enclosed rolls of tobacco became at all common among Englishmen; and it is quite likely that the credit (or discredit, as the reader pleases) of bringing them into general, and especially into fashionable, use, has been rightly given to Laurence Oliphant.

Cigarettes were perhaps in fashion in 1870.  In “Puck,” which was published in that year, Ouida—­who is hardly an unimpeachable authority on the ways and customs of fashionable folk, though she loved to paint fancy pictures of their sayings and doings—­pictures the Row:  “the most fashionable lounge you have, but it is a Republic for all that.”  There, she says, “could Bill Jacobs lean against a rail, with a clay-pipe in his mouth, and a terrier under his arm, close beside the Earl of Guilliadene, with his cigarette and his eye-glass, and his Poole-cut habiliments.”

Thirty years or more ago the late Andrew Lang wrote an article entitled “Enchanted Cigarettes,” which began—­“To dream our literary projects, Balzac says, is like ‘smoking enchanted cigarettes,’ but when we try to tackle our projects, to make them real, the enchantment disappears—­we have to till the soil, to sow the weed, to gather the leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manufactured, while there may be no market for them after all.  Probably most people have enjoyed the fragrance of