From Chapter 10:
Those who smoked pipes at Cambridge continued to smoke pipes afterwards, whatever "society" might do. Spedding, who spent his life on the elucidation of Bacon, was one of the "Apostles," and he continued a pipe-lover to the end. In 1832 we hear of Tennyson being in London with him, and "smoking all the day."

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 6:
smoking was still popular also at Oxford. A. D'Anvers, in her "Academia; or the Humours of Oxford," 1691, speaks, indeed, of undergraduates who, when they could not get tobacco, did much as the parson of Thornton is reputed to have done, as already related in Chapter II, i.e. they condescended to smoke fragments of mats. With this may be compared the macaronic lines:

From Chapter Chapter 8:
Cowper then goes on to attack tobacco in lines which show how unpopular smoking at that date was with ladies, and which have since often been quoted by anti-tobacconists with grateful appreciation:

Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
The sex whose presence civilizes ours;
Thou art indeed the drug a gardener wants,
To poison vermin that infest his plants,
But are we so to wit and beauty blind,
As to despise the glory of our kind,
And show the softest minds and fairest forms
As little mercy as the grubs and worms?

Notwithstanding this "satiric wipe," it is not likely that Cowper would have had much sympathy with John Wesley, who, in his detestation of what had been his father's solace at Epworth, forbade his preachers either to smoke or to take snuff.