While on his American speaking tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Leadville, Colorado, where he went into a saloon. There was a piano player in the corner with a sign over him that said: DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST; HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It was, observed Wilde, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He also visited a nearby mine where, upon reaching the bottom, the miners implored him to stay for supper: “the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”

In his Brief Lives, John Aubrey wrote that in 1618 Walter Raleigh “took a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the scaffold, which some formal persons were scandalized at, but I think ’twas well and properly done to settle his spirits.” Often credited with popularizing smoking in England, Raleigh was sentenced to death for treason by King James I, who had published his Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604.