Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Taking tobacco was clearly an accomplishment to be studied seriously. Shift, a professor of the art in Jonson's play, puts up a bill in St. Paul's—the recognized centre for advertisements and commercial business of every kind—in which he offers to teach any young gentleman newly come into his inheritance, who wishes to be as exactly qualified as the best of the ordinary-hunting gallants are—"to entertain the most gentlemanlike use of tobacco; as first, to give it the most exquisite perfume; then to know all the delicate sweet forms for the assumption of it; as also the rare corollary and practice of the Cuban ebolition, euripus and whiff, which he shall receive, or take in here at London, and evaporate at Uxbridge, or farther, if it please him."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

Smoking was soon as common in the country as in London. On Wednesday, April 16, 1621, in the course of a debate in the House of Commons, Sir William Stroud, who seems to have been a worthy disciple of that tobacco-hater, King James I, moved that he "would have tobacco banished wholly out of the kingdom, and that it may not be brought in from any part, nor used amongst us"; and Sir Grey Palmes said "that if tobacco be not banished, it will overthrow 100,000 men in England, for now it is so common that he hath seen ploughmen take it as they are at plough." Perhaps this terrible picture of a ploughman smoking as he followed his lonely furrow did not impress the House so much as Sir Grey evidently thought it would; at all events, tobacco was not banished.

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