From Chapter 7: Hogarth's subscription ticket for the print of
Sigismunda was
Time smoking a Picture (1761). It represents an old man sitting on a fragment of statuary and
smoking a long pipe against a picture of a landscape which stands upon an easel before him. Below, on his left, is a large jar labelled "Varnish." The figure of Time is nude and has large wings. Volumes of smoke are pouring against the surface of the picture from both his mouth and the bowl of his long clay pipe. In
The Stage-Coach, or Country Inn-yard, is shown an old woman
smoking a pipe in the "basket" of the coach. The plate of
The Distrest Poet (1736) shows four books and three tobacco-pipes on a shelf. In the second of the "Election" series—the
Canvassing for Votes (1755)—a barber and a cobbler, seated at the table in the right-hand 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.
From Chapter 9: There would appear to have been some
smokers who disliked the new-fangled cigars. Angelo seems, from various passages in his "Reminiscences," to have been a
smoker, and to have been very frequently in the company of
smokers, yet he could write: "There are few things which, after a foreign tour, more forcibly remind us that we are again in England, than the superiority of our stage-coaches. There is something very exhilarating in being carried through the air with rapidity ... considering the rate at which stage-coaches now travel [
i.e. in and just before 1830] ... a place on the box or front of a prime set-out is, indeed, a considerable treat. But alas! no human enjoyment is free from alloy. A Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner with his cigar in his mouth, has it in his power to turn the draft of sweet air into a cup of bitterness." Perhaps Angelo's objection was more to the quality of the cigar that would be smoked by a "Jew pedlar or mendicant foreigner," than to the cigar itself. Yet, going on to describe a journey to Hastings, sitting "on the roof in front" beside an acquaintance, he says, notwithstanding the enjoyment of dashing along, anecdote and jest going merrily on, "we had the annoyance of a coxcomb perched on the box, infecting the fresh air which Heaven had sent us, with the smoke of his abominable cigar," which looks as if his real objection was to
cigars, as such.