From Chapter 8:
The allusion in these verses to a "satiric wipe" refers to a passage in the poem entitled "Conversation," which Cowper had written in the previous year, 1781. In this passage tobacco is abused in terms which Cowper clearly felt to need modification after his personal intercourse with such a smoker as his friend Bull. In describing, in "Conversation," the manner in which a story is sometimes told, the poet says:

The pipe, with solemn interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause and puff—and speak, and pause again.
Such often, like the tube they so admire,
Important triflers! have more smoke than fire.

From Chapter 13:
The history of smoking by women through Victorian days need not detain us long. There have always been pipe-smokers among the women of the poorer classes. Up to the middle of the last century smoking was very common among the hard-working women of Northumberland and the Scottish border. Nor has the practice by any means yet died out. In May 1913, a woman, who was charged with drunkenness at the West Ham police court, laid the blame for her condition on her pipe. She said she had smoked it for twenty years, and "it always makes me giddy!" The writer, in August 1913, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.

It is not so very long ago that an English traveller heard a working-man courteously ask a Scottish fish-wife, who had entered a smoking-compartment of the train, whether she objected to smoking. The good woman slowly produced a well-seasoned "cutty" pipe, and as she began to cut up a "fill" from a rank-smelling tobacco, replied: "Na, na, laddie, I've come in here for a smoke ma'sel."