From Chapter 3:
Another tract which may be classed with Venner's "Treatise" was the "Nepenthes or the Vertues of tobacco," by Dr. William Barclay, which was published at Edinburgh in 1614. This is sometimes referred to and quoted, as by Fairholt, as if it were a whole-hearted defence of tobacco-taking. But Barclay enlarges mainly on the medicinal virtues of the herb. "If Tabacco," he says, "were used physically and with discretion there were no medicament in the worlde comparable to it"; and again: "In Tabacco there is nothing which is not medicine, the root, the stalke, the leaves, the seeds, the smoake, the ashes." The doctor gives sundry directions for administering tobacco—"to be used in infusion, in decoction, in substance, in smoke, in salt." But Barclay clearly does not sympathize with its indiscriminate use for pleasure. "As concerning the smoke," he says, "it may be taken more frequently, and for the said effects, but always fasting, and with emptie stomack, not as the English abusers do, which make a smoke-boxe of their skull, more fit to be carried under his arme that selleth at Paris dunoir a noircir to blacke mens shooes then to carie the braine of him that can not walke, can not ryde except the Tabacco Pype be in his mouth." He goes on to say that he was once in company with an English merchant in Normandy—"betweene Rowen and New-haven"—who was a merry fellow, but was constantly wanting a coal to kindle his tobacco. "The Frenchman wondered and I laughed at his intemperancie."

From Chapter 6:
Grave wits, who, spending farthings four,
Sit, smoke, and warm themselves an hour.

The allusions in the Spectator to smoking in the coffee-houses are frequent. "Sometimes," says Addison, in his title character in the first number of the paper, "sometimes I smoak a pipe at Child's and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-man, over-hear the conversation of every table in the room." And here is a vignette of coffee-house life in 1714 from No. 568 of the Spectator: "I was yesterday in a coffee-house not far from the Royal Exchange, where I observed three persons in close conference over a pipe of tobacco; upon which, having filled one for my own use, I lighted it at the little wax candle that stood before them; and after having thrown in two or three whiffs amongst them, sat down and made one of the company. I need not tell my reader, that lighting a man's pipe at the same candle is looked upon among brother-smoakers as an overture to conversation and friendship." From the very beginning smoking has induced and fostered a spirit of comradeship.