From Chapter 3: Musicke, tobacco, sacke and sleepe,
The tide of sorrow backward keep.

An ingenious lover of his pipe declared ironically in the same year that he had found three bad qualities in tobacco, for it made a man a thief (which meant danger), a good fellow (which meant cost), and a niggard ("the name of which is hateful"). "It makes him a theefe," he continued "for he will steale it from his father; a good fellow, for he will give the smoake to a beggar; a niggard, for he will not part with his box to an Emperor!" A character in one of Chapman's plays, 1606, calls tobacco "the gentleman's saint and the soldier's idol." A little-known bard of 1630—Barten Holiday—wrote a poem of eight stanzas with chorus to each in praise of tobacco, in which he showed with a touch of burlesque that the herb was a musician, a lawyer, a physician, a traveller, a critic, an ignis fatuus, and a whiffler, i.e. a braggart. The first verse may suffice as a specimen:

From Chapter 7:
It seems to have been taken for granted that country parsons smoked. smoking was universal among their male parishioners from the squire to the labourer (when he could afford it), so that it was only natural that the parson, with little to do, and in those days not too much inclination to do it, should be as fond of his pipe as the rest of the world around him. In a World of 1756 there is an account of a country gentleman entertaining one evening the vicar of the parish, and the host as a matter of course proceeds to order a bottle of wine with pipes and tobacco to be placed on the table. The vicar forthwith "filled his pipe, and drank very cordially to my friend," his host. One cannot doubt that Laurence Sterne, that most remarkable of country parsons, smoked. His "My Uncle Toby" is among the immortals, and Toby without his pipe is unimaginable.