Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

A converse view of smoking may be seen in Izaak Walton's "Life" of Sir Henry Wotton, who died in 1639. Walton says that Wotton obtained relief to some extent from asthma by leaving off smoking which he had practised "somewhat immoderately"—"as many thoughtful men do." The italics are mine.

Tobacco, as has been said, was praised as well as abused extravagantly. Much absurdity was written in glorification of the medicinal and therapeutic properties of tobacco, but a more sensible note was struck by some lauders of the weed. Marston wrote in 1607:

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

A few years earlier, in November 1825, Scott had written in his "Journal" that after dinner he usually smoked a couple of cigars which operated as a sedative—:

Just to drive the cold winter away,
And drown the fatigues of the day.

"I smoked a good deal," he continued, "about twenty years ago when at Ashestiel; but, coming down one morning to the parlour, I found, as the room was small and confined, that the smell was unpleasant, and laid aside the use of the Nicotian weed for many years; but was again led to use it by the example of my son, a hussar officer, and my son-in-law, an Oxford student. I could lay it aside to-morrow; I laugh at the dominion of custom in this and many things.

We make the giants first, and then do not kill them."

Scott's remark that Lockhart smoked when an Oxford student rather discredits Archdeacon's Denison's statement, quoted in the preceding chapter, that smoking was very generally unknown in Oxford in 1823-24. The archdeacon was writing from memory—a very untrustworthy recorder; Scott's remark was that of a contemporary.

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