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Tobacco Talk and Smokers Gossip 

THE present collection of Notes and Anecdotes has been gleaned from the more generally interesting portion of a History of Tobacco, which for some few years has been in progress, and the materials for which were gathered from every available source.

Not only novels and plays, old newspapers, travels and memoirs, have been examined or perused; but the works of poets and satirists, histories, acts of parliament, technical treatises, the accounts of early voyages, collec- tions of tracts and tobacco journals, have been ransacked for contributions on the use and abuse, the praise and blame, of the "plant divine."

For the delectation of all devotees of Tobacco ; for those who take their Latakia from the seductive meerschaum, or Virginia from the clay; for those who taste the " naked beauties " of sweet Havana, as well as those who the " primrose path of dalliance tread " with a cigarette between their teeth ; we have brought together in this little volume droll stories of the pipe, the romantic history of the snuff-box, odds and ends of Tobacco lo^e, and pages of splendid panegyric by nico- tians such as Charles Lamb and Byron, Bulwer and Thackeray.

Here too will be found pleasant gossip about famous tobacco-takers from Raleigh to Tennyson ; not omit- ting the small sins of royalty, the backslidings of bishops (archbishops too) in this respect ; soldiers and doctors, lawyers and artists, poets and peers — every one in short who is an honour to nicotian society, among whom one living lady at least must be numbered — no less exalted a person- age than an Empress !

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