Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

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.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

From the examples given in Burn's "Descriptive Catalogue of London Tokens" of the seventeenth century, it is clear that the "Tobacco Roll" was a warm favourite. "Three Tobacco Rolls" was also used as a sign. In 1732 there was a "Tobacco Roll" in Finch Lane, on the north side of Cornhill, "over against the Swan and Rummer Tavern." In 1766, Mrs. Flight, tobacconist, carried on her business at the "Tobacco Roll. Next door but one to St. Christopher's Church, Threadneedle Street."

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