Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

Evidently the intention was to make things pleasant for the royal foe of tobacco during his visit. It would appear to be a fair inference from the wording of this prohibition that when the King was not at Cambridge, graduates and scholars and students could resume their liberty to resort to inns, taverns, ale-houses and tobacco-shops, and presumably to take tobacco in St. Mary's Church, without question.

The prohibition, in the regulation quoted, of smoking in St. Mary's Church, referred, it may be noted, to the Act which was held therein. Candidates for degrees, or graduates to display their proficiency, publicly maintained theses; and this performance was termed keeping or holding an Act.
It is, of course, conceivable that the prohibition, so far as the church and Trinity College Hall were concerned, was against the taking of snuff rather than against smoking; but the phrase "to take tobacco" was at that time quite commonly applied to smoking, and, considering the extraordinary and immoderate use of tobacco soon after its introduction, it is not in the least incredible that pipes were lighted, at least occasionally, even in sacred buildings.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

The following year he wrote to Coleridge—"What do you think of smoking? I want your sober, average, noon opinion, of it. I generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it. Morning is a girl, and can't smoke—she's no evidence one way or the other; and Night is so evidently bought over, he can't be a very upright judge. Maybe the truth is that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome, and that's the sum on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason.... After all, our instincts may be best." It is clear from one or two references, that Lamb and Coleridge had been accustomed to smoke together at their meetings in early days at the "Salutation and Cat"—with less disastrous results to Coleridge, it is to be hoped, than those which followed his Birmingham smoke, as set forth in the preceding chapter.

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