It has sometimes been said that Swift smoked; but this is a mistake.  He had a fancy for taking tobacco in a slightly different way from the fashionable mode of taking snuff.  He told Stella that he had left off snuff altogether, and then in the very next sentence remarked that he had “a noble roll of tobacco for grating, very good.”  And in a later letter to Stella, May 24, 1711, he asked if she still snuffed, and went on to say, in sentences that seem to contradict one another:  “I have left it off, and when anybody offers me their box, I take about a tenth part of what I used to do, then just smell to it, and privately fling the rest away.  I keep to my tobacco still, as you say; but even much less of that than formerly, only mornings and evenings, and very seldom in the day.”  One might infer from this that he smoked, but this Swift never did.  His practice was to snuff up cut and dried tobacco, which was sometimes just coloured with Spanish snuff.  This he did all his life, but as the mixture he took was not technically snuff, he never owned that he took snuff.

Another cleric of the period, well known to fame, who took snuff but also loved his pipe, was Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire, from 1697 to 1735.  He not only smoked his pipe, but sang its praises: 

In these raw mornings, when I’m freezing ripe, What can compare with a tobacco-pipe?  Primed, cocked and toucht, ’twould better heat a man Than ten Bath Faggots or Scotch warming-pan.

Samuel’s greater son, John Wesley, did not share the parental love of a pipe.  He spoke of the use of tobacco as “an uncleanly and unwholesome self-indulgence,” and described snuffing as “a silly, nasty, dirty custom.”

The London clergy seem to have smoked at one time as a matter of course at their gatherings at Sion College, their headquarters.  An entry in the records under date February 14, 1682, relating to a Court Meeting, runs:  “Paid Maddocks [the Messenger] for Attendinge and Pipes 6d.”  How long pipes continued to be concomitants of the meetings of the College’s General Court I cannot say; but smoking and the annual dinners were long associated.  At the anniversary feast in 1743 there were two tables to provide for, the total number of guests being about thirty, and two “corses” to each.  The cost of the food, as Canon Pearce tells us in his excellent and entertaining book on the College and its Library, was L19 15s., or rather more than 13s. a head.  The bill for wines and tobacco amounted to five guineas, or about 3s. 6d. a head, and for this modest sum the thirty convives enjoyed eleven gallons of “Red Oporto,” one of “White Lisbon,” and three of “Mountain,” to the accompaniment of two pounds of tobacco (at 3s. 4d. the pound) smoked in “half a groce of pipes” (at 1s.).