From Chapter 2:
Hentzner, the German traveller, who visited London in 1598, speaks of smoking being customary among the audience at plays, who were also supplied with "fruits, such as apples, pears and nuts, according to the season, carried about to be sold, as well as ale and wine." He was struck with the universal prevalence of the tobacco-habit. Not only at plays, but "everywhere else," he says, the "English are constantly smoking tobacco," and then he proceeds to describe how they did it: "They have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the further end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder; and putting fire to it, they draw the smoak into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it plenty of phlegm and defluxions from the head." This suggests that the unpleasant and quite unnecessary habit of spitting was common with these early smokers, a suggestion which is amply supported by other contemporary evidence.

From Chapter 7:
The country gentlemen of the time followed the hounds and enjoyed rural sports of all kinds, drank ale, and smoked tobacco. They had their smoking-rooms too. Walter Gale, schoolmaster at Mayfield, Sussex, noted in his Journal under date March 26, 1751: "I went to Mr. Baker's for the list of scholars, and found him alone in the smoaking-room; he ordered a pint of mild beer for me, an extraordinary thing." Gale himself was a regular smoker, and too fond of pints of ale.

Fielding has immortalized the squire of the mid-eighteenth century in his picture of that sporting, roaring, swearing, drinking, smoking, affectionate, irascible, blundering, altogether extraordinary owner of broad acres, Squire Western. We may shrewdly suspect that the portrait of Western is somewhat over-coloured, and cannot fairly be taken as typical; but there is sufficient evidence to show that in some respects at least—in his enthusiasm for sport and love of ale and tobacco—Western is representative of the country squires of his day.