_Return, ye days when endless pleasure I found in reading or in leisure! When calm around the Common Room I puff'd my daily pipe's perfume! Rode for a stomach, and inspected, At annual bottlings, corks selected: And dined untax'd, untroubled, under The portrait of our pious Founder!_ Warton and another Oxford smoker of some distinction--the Rev. William Crowe, who was Public Orator from 1784 to 1829--are both said to have been, like Prior, rather fond of frequenting the company of persons of humble rank and little education, with whom they would drink their ale and smoke their pipes. Mr. A.D. Godley, in his "Oxford in the Eighteenth Century," gives an excellent English version of the Latin original of one of the Christ Church "Carmina Quadragesmalia," which affords much the same picture of the daily life of an Oxford Fellow in the days when George I was king. This good man lives strictly by rule, and each returning day-- _Ne'er swerves a hairbreadth from the same old way. Always within the memory of men He's risen at eight and gone to bed at ten: The same old cat his College room partakes, The same old scout his bed each morning makes: On mutton roast he daily dines in state (Whole flocks have perished to supply his plate), Takes just one turn to catch the westering sun, Then reads the paper, as he's always done; Soon cracks in Common-room the same old jokes, Drinking three glasses ere three pipes he smokes:-- And what he did while Charles our throne did fill 'Neath George's heir you'll find him doing still._ It seems to have been taken for granted that country parsons smoked. Smoking was universal among their male parishioners from the squire to the labourer (when he could afford it), so that it was only natural that the parson, with little to do, and in those days not too much inclination to do it, should be as fond of his pipe as the rest of the world around him. In a _World_ of 1756 there is an account of a country gentleman entertaining one evening the vicar of the parish, and the host as a matter of course proceeds to order a bottle of wine with pipes and tobacco to be placed on the table. The vicar forthwith "filled his pipe, and drank very cordially to my friend," his host. One cannot doubt that Laurence Sterne, that most remarkable of country parsons, smoked. His "My Uncle Toby" is among the immortals, and Toby without his pipe is unimaginable.