Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Some men seem to act upon Mark Twain's principle of never smoking when asleep or at meals, and never refraining at any other time. But excess is self-condemned. There is no good reason why anyone, for social or any other reasons, should look askance at the reasonable use of tobacco. "But used in moderation, what evils, let me ask,"—I again quote Dr. Andrew Wilson's calm good sense—"are to be found in the train of the tobacco-habit! A man doesn't get delirium tremens even if he smokes more than is good for him; he doesn't become a debased mortal; there is nothing about tobacco which makes a man beat his wife or assault his mother-in-law—rather the reverse, in fact, for tobacco is a soother and a quietener of the passions, and many a man, I daresay, has been prevented from doing rash things in the way of retaliation, when he has lit his pipe and had a good think over his affairs. Whenever anybody counterblasts to-day against tobacco, I feel as did my old friend Wilkie Collins, when somebody told him that to smoke was a wrong thing. 'My dear sir,' said the great novelist, 'all your objections to tobacco only increase the relish with which I look forward to my next cigar!'"

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 6:

Other well-known men of the late seventeenth century were "tobacconists" in the old sense of the word. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have smoked immoderately; and a familiar anecdote represents him as using for the purposes of a tobacco-stopper, in a fit of absent-mindedness, the little finger of a lady sitting beside him, whom he admired, but the truth of this legend is open to doubt. Thomas Hobbes, who lived to be ninety (1588-1679), was accustomed to dine at 11 o'clock, after which he smoked a pipe and then lay down and took a nap of about half an hour. No doubt he would have attributed the length of his days to the regularity of his habits. Izaak Walton, who also lived to be ninety, as the lover of the placid and contemplative life deserved to do, loved his pipe, though he seldom mentions smoking in the "Compleat Angler." Sir Samuel Garth, poet and physician, once known to fame as the author of "The Dispensary," was another pipe-lover, as is shown by his verses quoted at the head of this chapter. Dudley, the fourth Lord North, began to smoke in 1657, and, says Dr. Jessopp, "the habit grew upon him, the frequent entries for pipes and tobacco showing that he became more and more addicted to this indulgence. Probably it afforded him some solace in the dreadful malady from which he suffered so long."

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