a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause and puff--and speak, and pause again.
Such often, like the tube they so admire,
Important triflers! have more smoke than fire._

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.

In the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century smoking
reached its nadir. No dandy smoked. If some witnesses may be believed
smoking had almost died out even at Oxford. Archdeacon Denison wrote
in his "Memories"--"When I went up to Oxford, 1823-24, there were two
things unknown in Christ Church, and I believe very generally in
Oxford--smoking and slang"; but one cannot help fancying that the
archdeacon's memory was not quite trustworthy. It is difficult to
imagine that there was ever a time when the slang of the day was not
current on the lips of young Oxford, or that so long as tobacco was
procurable it did not find its way into college rooms.

If smoking had died out at Oxford its decline must have been rapid.
When a certain young John James was an undergraduate of Queen's, 1778
to 1781, he and his correspondents spoke severely of the "miserable
condition of Fellows who (under the liberal pretence of educating
youth) spend half their lives in smoking tobacco and reading the
newspapers." About 1800 the older or more old-fashioned of the Fellows
at New College, "not liking the then newly introduced luxury of Turkey
carpets," says Mr. G.V. Cox, in his "Recollections of Oxford," 1868,
"often adjourned to smoke their pipe in a little room opposite to the
Senior Common-room, now appropriated to other uses,