From Chapter 4:
Some of the Puritan colonists in America took a strong line on the subject. Under the famous "Blue Laws" of 1650 it was ordered by the General Court of Connecticut that no one under twenty-one was to smoke—"nor any other that hath not already accustomed himself to the use thereof." And no smoker could enjoy his pipe unless he obtained a doctor's certificate that tobacco would be "usefull for him, and allso that he hath received a lycense from the Courte for the same." But the unhappy smoker having passed the doctor and obtained his licence was still harassed by restrictions, for it was ordered that no man within the colony, after the publication of the order, should take any tobacco publicly "in the streett, highwayes, or any barn-yardes, or uppon training dayes, in any open places, under the penalty of six-pence for each offence against this order." The ingenuities of petty tyranny are ineffable. It is said that these "Blue Laws" are not authentic; but if they are not literally true, they are certainly well invented, for most of them can be paralleled and illustrated by laws and regulations of undoubted authenticity.

From Chapter Chapter 8:
Cowper then goes on to attack tobacco in lines which show how unpopular smoking at that date was with ladies, and which have since often been quoted by anti-tobacconists with grateful appreciation:

Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
The sex whose presence civilizes ours;
Thou art indeed the drug a gardener wants,
To poison vermin that infest his plants,
But are we so to wit and beauty blind,
As to despise the glory of our kind,
And show the softest minds and fairest forms
As little mercy as the grubs and worms?

Notwithstanding this "satiric wipe," it is not likely that Cowper would have had much sympathy with John Wesley, who, in his detestation of what had been his father's solace at Epworth, forbade his preachers either to smoke or to take snuff.