From Chapter 3:
Tobacco's a musician,
And in a pipe delighteth,
It descends in a close
Through the organ of the nose
With a relish that inviteth.

These are merely a few examples of both the praise and the abuse which were lavished upon tobacco at this early stage in the history of smoking. It would be easy to fill many pages with the like testimonials and denunciations, especially the latter, from writers of the early decades of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most curious thing in connexion with the immense number of allusions to smoking in the literature of the period is that there is no mention whatever of tobacco or smoking in the plays of William Shakespeare. As Edmund Spenser, in the "Faerie Queene," speaks of

From Chapter 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.