From Chapter 8: More than one writer of recent days has absurdly misrepresented Johnson as a
smoker. The author of a book on tobacco published a few years ago wrote—"Dr. Johnson smoked like a furnace"—a grotesquely untrue statement—and "all his friends, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, were his companions in tobacco-worship." Reynolds, we know—
When they talk'd of their Raphaels, Corregios, and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.
Johnson and all his company took snuff, as every one in the fashionable world, and a great many others outside that charmed circle, did; but Johnson did not smoke, and I doubt whether any of the others did.
