Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1891 — Tobacco and Fame. [ARTICLE]

Tobacco and Fame.

An American woman who considers graceful smoking an elegant accomplishment has taken the trouble to accumulate a number of facts relative to the great men who have been addicted to this habit, and submits the following as the result of her investigation: Ben Johnson loved the weed and smoked habitually, describing every incident of his experience with his pipe with the gusto of the connoisseur. Hobbes, the philosopher, smoked after dinner invariably a pipe, amd not moderately. Glorious Milton, be, fore retiring, always indulged in a pipe of peace and a glass of water. Even Sir Isaac Newton was dreamily blowing wreaths of smoke from his mouth in his garden at Woolsthorpe when the apple fell that led to the discovery of the Jaw of gravitation. Addison was rarely seen without his pipe at Button’s. Fielding, the novelist, added to the habit of smoking the vice of chewing. Of the more modern poets Shelley never smoked, not Wordswlrth bar

Keats as far as known. Oolertdg« was an inveterate opium eater, but when cured of that he became addicted to snuff. Campbell had a tender affection for his pipe and never got over it. Sir Walter Scott smoked when riding and after dinner, loving both pipes ana cirgars. Byron sung perhaps more than any other poet the praises of "sublime tobacco," but it is a well established fact that he smoked very moderately. Goethe, like Shakspeare, did not smoke. Carlyle took great comfort from the weed for many years before his death—greatly to the disgust of his wife. Douglas Jerrold used to puff away between his jokes. Ol novelists of this century, Dickens and Thackeray were both smokers, and Lord Lytton indulged in a pipe at night but preferred cigars in the daytime. Moore, the Irish poet, eared very little for pipes or cigars, in fact, Irish gentlemen as a rule, smoking much less than the English, and the Germans more than either. The Duke of Wellington was a total abstinence man on the subject of tobacc#, as was also Sir Robert Peel. Disraeli dearly loved his pipe whei a young man, but grew sensitive in middle life and characterized it “the tomb of love.”