From Chapter 4: On weekdays many New England Puritans probably smoked as their friends in old England did. A contemporary painting of a group of Puritan divines over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of Newbury, shows them well provided with punch-bowl and drinking-cups, tobacco and pipes. One parson, the Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of Charlestown, was very unconventional in his attire. He seldom wore a coat, "but generally appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth." John Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the Indians, warmly denounced both the wearing of wigs and the
smoking of tobacco. But his denunciations were ineffectual in both matters—heads continued to be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and pipe-smoke continued to ascend.
From Chapter 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.
