From Chapter 2: Tobacco engages
Both sexes, all ages,
The poor as well as the wealthy;
From the court to the cottage,
From childhood to dotage,
Both those that are sick and the healthy.
This chapter and the next deal with the history of
smoking during the first fifty years after its introduction as a social habit—roughly to 1630.
The use
of tobacco spread with extraordinary rapidity among all classes of society. During the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign and through the early decades of the seventeenth century tobacco-pipes were in full blast. Tobacco was triumphant.
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.