Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

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.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

The following year he wrote to Coleridge—"What do you think of smoking? I want your sober, average, noon opinion, of it. I generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it. Morning is a girl, and can't smoke—she's no evidence one way or the other; and Night is so evidently bought over, he can't be a very upright judge. Maybe the truth is that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome, and that's the sum on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason.... After all, our instincts may be best." It is clear from one or two references, that Lamb and Coleridge had been accustomed to smoke together at their meetings in early days at the "Salutation and Cat"—with less disastrous results to Coleridge, it is to be hoped, than those which followed his Birmingham smoke, as set forth in the preceding chapter.

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