For World No Tobacco Day

 Today is, believe it or not, World No Tobacco Day, an annual observance instituted in 1987 by the World Health Organisation, the outfit that steered us through the Covid business with such masterly calmness, consistency and unfailing expertise, hem hem. 
The day calls for a poem by way of a counterblast  – a light-hearted celebration of the joys of tobacco smoking by the minor poet and popular university wit Charles Stuart Calverley, the only man to have won the Chancellor's Prize for Latin verse at both Oxford and Cambridge. His 'Ode to Tobacco' (1862) can still be seen (as far as I know) on a bronze plaque on the wall of what in my day was still Bacon's tobacconist's in Cambridge. This shop, I seem to remember, also had a tobacco store Indian on display in those days (it was not my regular tobacconist's – I preferred the legendary Colin Lunn, a man of impeccable manners and the utmost discretion, whose shop stood on King's Parade).
Here is the 'Ode to Tobacco' – 

Thou, who when fears attack
Bidst them avaunt, and Black
Care, at the horseman's back
Perching, unseatest;
Sweet when the morn is gray;
Sweet when they've cleared away
Lunch; and at close of day
Possibly sweetest!

I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told
Not to thy credit:
How one (or two at most)
Drops make a cat a ghost,—
Useless, except to roast—
Doctors have said it;

How they who use fusees
All grow by slow degrees
Brainless as chimpanzees,
Meagre as lizards,
Go mad, and beat their wives,
Plunge (after shocking lives)
Razors and carving-knives
Into their gizzards.

Confound such knavish tricks!
Yet know I five or six
Smokers who freely mix
Still with their neighbours,—
Jones, who, I'm glad to say,
Asked leave of Mrs. J.,
Daily absorbs a clay
After his labours.

Cats may have had their goose
Cooked by tobacco juice;
Still, why deny its use
Thoughtfully taken?
We're not as tabbies are;
Smith, take a fresh cigar!
Jones, the tobacco jar!
Here's to thee, Bacon!