Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Deacon, as the title of his book just quoted shows, was very fond of alliteration, and one sentence of his diatribe may be quoted. He warned his readers that tobacco-smoke was "very pernicious unto their bodies, too profluvious for many of their purses, and most pestiferous to the publike State." Much may be forgiven, however, to the introducer of so charming a term of abuse as "profluvious." Deacon's book takes the form of a dialogue, and after nearly 200 pages of argument, in which the unfortunate herb gets no mercy, one of the interlocutors, a trader in tobacco, is so convinced of the iniquity of his trade, and of his own parlous state if he continue therein, that he declares that the two hundred pounds' worth of this "beastly tobacco" which he owns, shall "presently packe to the fire," or else be sent "swimming down the Thames."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

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.

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