From Chapter 9:
A few years earlier, in November 1825, Scott had written in his "Journal" that after dinner he usually smoked a couple of cigars which operated as a sedative—:

Just to drive the cold winter away,
And drown the fatigues of the day.

"I smoked a good deal," he continued, "about twenty years ago when at Ashestiel; but, coming down one morning to the parlour, I found, as the room was small and confined, that the smell was unpleasant, and laid aside the use of the Nicotian weed for many years; but was again led to use it by the example of my son, a hussar officer, and my son-in-law, an Oxford student. I could lay it aside to-morrow; I laugh at the dominion of custom in this and many things.

We make the giants first, and then do not kill them."

Scott's remark that Lockhart smoked when an Oxford student rather discredits Archdeacon's Denison's statement, quoted in the preceding chapter, that smoking was very generally unknown in Oxford in 1823-24. The archdeacon was writing from memory—a very untrustworthy recorder; Scott's remark was that of a contemporary.

From Chapter 14:
Another eighteenth-century instance of smoking in church, taken from historical fact and not from fiction, is associated with the church of Hayes, in Middlesex. The parish registers of that village bear witness to repeated disputes between the parson and bell-ringers and the parishioners generally in 1748-1754. In 1752 it was noted that a sermon had been preached after a funeral "to a noisy congregation." On another occasion, says the register, "the ringers and other inhabitants disturbed the service from the beginning of prayers to the end of the sermon, by ringing the bells, and going into the gallery to spit below"; while at yet another time "a fellow came into church with a pot of beer and a pipe," and remained "smoking in his own pew until the end of the sermon." Going to church at Hayes in those days must have been quite an exciting experience. No one knew what might happen next.