All-virtuous Herbert! on whose every part
Truth might spend all her voice, fame all her art!—
was a smoker, as we know from a very curious passage in his well-known autobiography. He appears to have smoked not so much for pleasure as for supposed reasons of health. "It is well known," he wrote, "to those that wait in my chamber, that the shirts, waistcoats, and other garments I wear next my body, are sweet, beyond what either can easily be believed, or hath been observed in any else, which sweetness also was found to be in my breath above others, before I used to take tobacco, which towards my latter time I was forced to take against certain rheums and catarrhs that trouble me, which yet did not taint my breath for any long time." The autobiography was written about 1645, so as Lord Herbert did not smoke till towards the latter part of his life—he died in 1648—he clearly was not one of those who took to tobacco in the first enthusiasm for the new indulgence.

From Chapter 8:
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, but then kept as a smoking-room." A Mr. Rhodes, a one-time Fellow of Worcester College, who was elected Esquire Bedel in Medicine and Arts in 1792, had a very peculiar way of enjoying his tobacco. Mr. Cox says: "On one occasion, when I had to call upon him, I found him drinking rum and water, and enjoying (what he called his luxury) the fumes of tobacco, not through a pipe or in the shape of a cigar, but burnt in a dish!"