Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

About 1842, when Tennyson often dined at the Old Cock (by Temple Bar) and at other taverns, the perfect dinner for his taste, says his son, was "a beef-steak, a potato, a cut of cheese, a pint of port, and afterwards a pipe (never a cigar)." When the Kingsleys paid the Tennysons a visit about 1859, Charles Kingsley, so the Laureate told his son, "talked as usual on all sorts of topics, and walked hard up and down the study for hours smoking furiously, and affirming that tobacco was the only thing that kept his nerves quiet." The late Laureate, Alfred Austin, once asked Tennyson, after reading a passage in Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journal" that William had gone to bed "very tired" with writing the "Prelude," if he had ever felt tired by writing poetry. "I think not," said the poet, "but tired with the accompaniment of too much smoking."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

Another famous nobleman, Lord Herbert of Cherbury—
All-virtuous Herbert! on whose every part
Truth might spend all her voice, fame all her art!—
was a smoker, as we know from a very curious passage in his well-known autobiography. He appears to have smoked not so much for pleasure as for supposed reasons of health. "It is well known," he wrote, "to those that wait in my chamber, that the shirts, waistcoats, and other garments I wear next my body, are sweet, beyond what either can easily be believed, or hath been observed in any else, which sweetness also was found to be in my breath above others, before I used to take tobacco, which towards my latter time I was forced to take against certain rheums and catarrhs that trouble me, which yet did not taint my breath for any long time." The autobiography was written about 1645, so as Lord Herbert did not smoke till towards the latter part of his life—he died in 1648—he clearly was not one of those who took to tobacco in the first enthusiasm for the new indulgence.

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