From Chapter 1:
"'It requires no effort of the fancy to picture these three men [Shakespeare, Bacon and Raleigh] as lounging in a window of Durham House, puffing the new Indian weed from silver bowls, discussing the highest themes in poetry and science, while gazing on the flower-beds and the river, the darting barges of dame and cavalier, and the distant pavilions of Paris garden and the Globe.'" This is a pure "effort of the fancy" so far as Bacon and Shakespeare are concerned. Shakespeare's absolute silence about tobacco forbids us to assume that he smoked; but of Raleigh the picture may be true enough. The house had, as Aubrey tells us, "a little turret that looked into and over the Thames, and had the prospect which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the world"; and it would be strange indeed if the owner of the noble house did not often smoke a contemplative pipe in the window of that pleasant turret.

From Chapter 6:
Sir Roger de Coverley, as a typical country squire, was naturally a smoker. He presented his friend the Spectator, the silent gentleman, with a tobacco-stopper made by Will Wimble, telling him that Will had been busy all the early part of the winter in turning great quantities of them, and had made a present of one to every gentleman in the county who had good principles and smoked. When Sir Roger was driving in a hackney-coach he called upon the coachman to stop, and when the man came to the window asked him if he smoked. While Sir Roger's companion was wondering "what this would end in," the knight bid his Jehu to "stop by the way at any good Tobacconist's, and take in a Roll of their best Virginia." And when he visited Squire's near Gray's Inn Gate, his first act was to call for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a dish of coffee, a newspaper and a wax candle; and all the boys in the coffee-room ran to serve him. The wax candle was of course a convenience in matchless days for pipe-lighting. The "paper of tobacco" was the equivalent of what is now vulgarly called a "screw" of tobacco.