From Chapter 1:
The form and make of the first pipe is a matter I do not propose to go into here; but in connexion with the first pipe smoked in this country Aubrey's interesting statements must be given. Writing in the time of Charles II, he said that he had heard his grandfather say that at first one pipe was handed from man to man round about the table. "They had first silver pipes; the ordinary sort made use of a walnut shell and a straw"—surely a very unsatisfactory pipe. Tobacco in those earliest days, he says, was sold for its weight in silver. "I have heard some of our old yeomen neighbours say that when they went to Malmesbury or Chippenham Market, they culled out their biggest shillings to lay in the scales against the tobacco."

From Chapter 2:
It may be noted, by the way, that the gallant had no hesitation about smoking in the presence of ladies. Gostanzo, in Chapman's "All Fools," 1605, says:

And for discourse in my fair mistress's presence
I did not, as you barren gallants do,
Fill my discourses up drinking tobacco.

And in Ben Jonson's "Every Man out of his Humour," 1600, Fastidious Brisk, "a neat, spruce, affecting courtier," smokes while he talks to his mistress. A feather-headed gallant, when in the presence of ladies, often found himself, like others of his tribe of later date, gravelled for lack of matter for conversation, and the puffing of tobacco-smoke helped to occupy the pauses.

When our gallant went to the theatre he loved to occupy one of the stools at the side of the stage. There he could sit and smoke and embarrass the actors with his audible criticisms of play and players.

From Chapter 5:
General Monk, to whom Charles II owed so much, is said to have indulged in the unpleasant habit of chewing tobacco, and to have been imitated by others; but the practice can never have been common.

From Chapter 9:
By 1830 smoking had so far "come in" again that a considerable proportion of the members of the House of Commons were smokers. Macaulay has drawn for us the not very attractive picture of the smoking-room of the old House of Commons—before the fire of 1834—in a letter to his sister dated in the summer of 1831. "I have left Sir Francis Burdett on his legs," he wrote, "and repaired to the smoking-room; a large, wainscoted, uncarpeted place, with tables covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a perfect cloud of fume. There have I seen (tell it not to the West Indians), Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open, and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself." In July 1832 he again dated a letter to his sisters from the House of Commons smoking-room. "I am writing here," he says, "at eleven at night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres ... with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils.... Reject not my letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room—

The room,—but I think I'll describe it in rhyme,
That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime.
The smell of tobacco was always the same:
But the chloride was bought since the cholera came."