From Chapter 3:
Tobacco's a musician,
And in a pipe delighteth,
It descends in a close
Through the organ of the nose
With a relish that inviteth.

These are merely a few examples of both the praise and the abuse which were lavished upon tobacco at this early stage in the history of smoking. It would be easy to fill many pages with the like testimonials and denunciations, especially the latter, from writers of the early decades of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most curious thing in connexion with the immense number of allusions to smoking in the literature of the period is that there is no mention whatever of tobacco or smoking in the plays of William Shakespeare. As Edmund Spenser, in the "Faerie Queene," speaks of

From Chapter 7:
Another foreign visitor to England, the Abbé Le Blanc, who was over here about 1730, found English customs rather trying. "Even at table," he says, "where they serve desserts, they do but show them, and presently take away everything, even to the tablecloth. By this the English, whom politeness does not permit to tell the ladies their company is troublesome, give them notice to retire.... The table is immediately covered with mugs, bottles and glasses; and often with pipes of tobacco. All things thus disposed, the ceremony of toasts begins."

The frowns and remonstrances of Quarterly and Monthly Meetings of Friends had not succeeded in putting the Quakers' pipes out. In a list of sea stores put on board a vessel called by the un-Quaker-like name of The Charming Polly, which brought a party of Friends across the Atlantic from Philadelphia in 1756, we find "In Samuel Fothergill's new chest ... Tobacco ... a Hamper ... a Barrel ... a box of pipes." The provident Samuel was well found for a long voyage.