Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

The country gentlemen of the time followed the hounds and enjoyed rural sports of all kinds, drank ale, and smoked tobacco. They had their smoking-rooms too. Walter Gale, schoolmaster at Mayfield, Sussex, noted in his Journal under date March 26, 1751: "I went to Mr. Baker's for the list of scholars, and found him alone in the smoaking-room; he ordered a pint of mild beer for me, an extraordinary thing." Gale himself was a regular smoker, and too fond of pints of ale.

Fielding has immortalized the squire of the mid-eighteenth century in his picture of that sporting, roaring, swearing, drinking, smoking, affectionate, irascible, blundering, altogether extraordinary owner of broad acres, Squire Western. We may shrewdly suspect that the portrait of Western is somewhat over-coloured, and cannot fairly be taken as typical; but there is sufficient evidence to show that in some respects at least—in his enthusiasm for sport and love of ale and tobacco—Western is representative of the country squires of his day.

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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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