u0d.net

From Chapter 4:
It is somewhat singular that the Puritans, who denounced most amusements and pleasures, and who frowned upon most of the occupations or diversions that make for gaiety and the enjoyment of life, did not, as Puritans, denounce the use of tobacco. One or two of their writers abused it roundly; but these were not representative of Puritan feeling on the subject. The explanation doubtless is that the practice of smoking was so very general and so much a matter of course among men of all ranks and of all opinions, that the mouths of Puritans were closed, so to speak, by their own pipes. A precisian, however, could take his tobacco with a difference. The seventeenth-century diarist, Abraham de la Pryme, says that he had heard of a Presbyterian minister who was so precise that "he would not as much as take a pipe of tobacco before that he had first sayed grace over it." George Wither, one of the most noteworthy of the poets who took the side of the Parliament, was confined in Newgate after the Restoration, and found comfort in his pipe.

From Chapter 8:
All's well that ends well; but one cannot help wondering what kind of tobacco it was that the Birmingham tradesman used, a half pipeful of which had such a deadly effect—but perhaps the effect was due to the salt, not to the tobacco.
In the year after that which witnessed Coleridge's adventure, i.e. in 1796, a tobacco-box with a history was the subject of a legal decision. This box, made of common horn and small enough to be carried in the pocket, was bought for fourpence by an overseer of the poor in the time of Queen Anne, and was presented by him in 1713 to the Society of Past Overseers of the parish of St. Margaret, Westminster. In 1720 the Society, in memory of the donor, ornamented the lid with a silver rim; and at intervals thereafter additions were made to an extraordinary extent to the box and its casings. Hogarth engraved within the lid in 1746 a bust of the victor of Culloden. Gradually the horn box was enshrined within one case after another—usually silver lined with velvet—each case bearing inscribed plates commemorating persons or events. A Past Overseer who detained the box in 1793 had to give it back after three years of litigation. A case of octagon shape records the triumph of Justice, and Lord Chancellor Loughborough pronouncing his decree for the restitution of the box on March 5, 1796. In later days many and various additions have been made to the many coverings of the box, recording public events of interest.