From 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:

From Chapter Chapter 8:
Cowper then goes on to attack tobacco in lines which show how unpopular smoking at that date was with ladies, and which have since often been quoted by anti-tobacconists with grateful appreciation:

Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
The sex whose presence civilizes ours;
Thou art indeed the drug a gardener wants,
To poison vermin that infest his plants,
But are we so to wit and beauty blind,
As to despise the glory of our kind,
And show the softest minds and fairest forms
As little mercy as the grubs and worms?

Notwithstanding this "satiric wipe," it is not likely that Cowper would have had much sympathy with John Wesley, who, in his detestation of what had been his father's solace at Epworth, forbade his preachers either to smoke or to take snuff.