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 7:
There is no mention of Parson Trulliber's pipe, but that pig-breeder and lover can hardly have been a non-smoker. Both the other clerical characters who appear in the book, the Roman Catholic priest who makes an equivocal appearance in the eighth chapter of the third book, and Parson Barnabas, who thinks that his own sermons are at least equal to Tillotson's, smoke their pipes. The other smokers in "Joseph Andrews" are the surgeon and the exciseman who, early in the story, are found sitting in the inn kitchen with Parson Barnabas, "smoking their pipes over some syderand"—the mysterious "cup" being a mixture of cider and something spirituous—and Joseph's father, old Gaffer Andrews, who appears at the end of the story, and complains bitterly that he wants his pipe, not having had a whiff that morning.

From Chapter 5:
The year 1660 that restored Charles II to his throne, restored a gaiety and brightness, not to say frivolity of tone, that had long been absent from English life. The following song in praise of tobacco, taken from a collection which was printed in 1660, is touched with the spirit of the time; though it is really founded on, and to no small extent taken from, some verses in praise of tobacco written by Samuel Rowlands in his "Knave of Clubs," 1611:

To feed on flesh is gluttony,
It maketh men fat like swine;
But is not he a frugal man
That on a leaf can dine?
He needs no linnen for to foul
His fingers' ends to wipe,
That has his kitchin in a box,
And roast meat in a pipe.
The cause wherefore few rich men's sons
Prove disputants in schools,
Is that their fathers fed on flesh,
And they begat fat fools.
This fulsome feeding cloggs the brain
And doth the stomach choak
But he's a brave spark that can dine
With one light dish of smoak.

There is nothing to show that King Charles smoked, nor what his personal attitude towards tobacco may have been.

From Chapter 1:
"'It requires no effort of the fancy to picture these three men [Shakespeare, Bacon and Raleigh] as lounging in a window of Durham House, puffing the new Indian weed from silver bowls, discussing the highest themes in poetry and science, while gazing on the flower-beds and the river, the darting barges of dame and cavalier, and the distant pavilions of Paris garden and the Globe.'" This is a pure "effort of the fancy" so far as Bacon and Shakespeare are concerned. Shakespeare's absolute silence about tobacco forbids us to assume that he smoked; but of Raleigh the picture may be true enough. The house had, as Aubrey tells us, "a little turret that looked into and over the Thames, and had the prospect which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the world"; and it would be strange indeed if the owner of the noble house did not often smoke a contemplative pipe in the window of that pleasant turret.