Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

He describes the box and its contents in lines which show not only tolerance but appreciation of tobacco, from which it is not unreasonable to infer that Cowper's first view of his friend's smoking-habit as a drawback—as shown in his letter to Unwin, quoted above—had been modified by neighbourhood and custom. It might have been well for the poet himself if he had learned to smoke a social pipe with his friend Bull. The appreciative lines run thus:

This oval box well filled
With best tobacco, finely milled,
Beats all Anticyra's pretences
To disengage the encumbered senses.
O Nymph of transatlantic fame,
Where'er thine haunt, whate'er thy name,
Whether reposing on the side
Of Oronoco's spacious tide,
Or listening with delight not small
To Niagara's distant fall,
'Tis thine to cherish and to feed
The pungent nose-refreshing weed,
Which, whether pulverized it gain
A speedy passage to the brain,
Or whether, touched with fire, it rise
In circling eddies to the skies,
Does thought more quicken and refine
Than all the breath of all the Nine—
Forgive the bard, if bard he be,
Who once too wantonly made free,
To touch with a satiric wipe
That symbol of thy power, the pipe;
        *     *     *     *     *     *     *
And so may smoke-inhaling Bull
Be always filling, never full.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The fine lady disliked tobacco. The author of "A Pipe of tobacco," in Dodsley's well-known "Collection," to which reference has already been made, wrote:

Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon;
They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.
* * * * * * *
Citronia vows it has an odious stink;
She will not smoke (ye gods!)-but she will drink;
and the same writer describes tobacco as "By ladies hated, hated by the beaux." Although the fine lady may have affected to swoon at the sight of pipes, and belles generally, like the beaux, may have disdained tobacco as vulgar, yet there were doubtless still to be found here and there respectable women who occasionally indulged in a smoke. In an early Spectator, Addison gives the rules of a "Twopenny Club, erected in this Place, for the Preservation of Friendship and good Neighbourhood," which met in a little ale-house and was frequented by artisans and mechanics. Rule II was, "Every member shall fill his pipe out of his own box"; and Rule VII was, "If any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or smokes."

In one of the valuable volumes issued by the Georgian Society of Dublin a year or two ago, Dr. Mahaffy, writing on the mid-eighteenth century society of the Irish capital, quotes an advertisement by a Dublin tobacconist of "mild pigtail for ladies" which suggests the alarming question-Did Irish ladies chew?

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