Johnstone, Parr’s biographer, referring to his hero’s failure to obtain preferment to the Episcopal Bench about the year 1804, says—­“His pipe might be deemed in these fantastic days a degradation at the table of the palace or the castle; but his noble hospitality, combined with his habits of sobriety, whether tobacco fumigated his table or not, would have filled his hall with the learned and the good.”  A portrait of Parr hangs in the Combination Room in St. John’s, Cambridge.  Originally it represented him faithfully with a long clay between hand and mouth; but for some unknown reason the pipe has been painted out.

A famous crony of Parr’s, the learned Porson, was another devotee of tobacco.  In November 1789 Parr wrote to Dr. Burney:  “The books may be consulted, and Porson shall do it, and he will do it.  I know his price when he bargains with me; two bottles instead of one, six pipes instead of two, burgundy instead of claret, liberty to sit till five in the morning instead of sneaking into bed at one:  these are his terms:”  and these few lines, it may be added, give a graphic picture of Porson.  According to Maltby, Porson once remarked that when smoking began to go out of fashion, learning began to go out of fashion also—­which shows what nonsense a learned man could talk.

Another famous parson, the Rev. John Newton, was a smoker, and so was Cowper’s other clerical friend, that learned and able Dissenter, the Rev. William Bull, whose whole mien and bearing were so dignified that on two occasions he was mistaken for a bishop.  Cowper appreciated snuff, but did not care for smoking, and when he wrote to Unwin, describing his new-made friend in terms of admiration, he concluded—­“Such a man is Mr. Bull.  But—­he smokes tobacco.  Nothing is perfection ‘Nihil est ab omni parte beatum.’” Bull, however, was not excessive in his smoking, for his daily allowance was but three pipes.  In his garden at Newport Pagnell, Bull showed Cowper a nook in which he had placed a bench, where he said he found it very refreshing to smoke his pipe and meditate.  “Here he sits,” wrote Cowper, “with his back against one brick wall, and his nose against another, which must, you know, be very refreshing, and greatly assist meditation.”

Cowper’s aversion from tobacco could not have been very strong, for he encouraged his friend to smoke in the famous Summer House at Olney, which was the poet’s outdoor study.  Bull smoked Orinoco tobacco, which he carried in one of the tobacco-boxes, which in those days were much more commonly used than pouches, and this box on one occasion he accidentally left behind him at Olney.  Cowper returned it to him with the well-known rhymed epistle dated June 22, 1782, and beginning: 

If reading verse be your delight, ’Tis mine as much, or more, to write; But what we would, so weak is man, Lies oft remote from what we can.

He describes the box and its contents in lines which show not only tolerance but appreciation of tobacco, from which it is not unreasonable to infer that Cowper’s first view of his friend’s smoking-habit as a drawback—­as shown in his letter to Unwin, quoted above—­had been modified by neighbourhood and custom.  It might have been well for the poet himself if he had learned to smoke a social pipe with his friend Bull.  The appreciative lines run thus: