From Chapter 1:
Wherever Raleigh is known to have lived or lodged we are sure to find the tradition flourishing that there he smoked his first pipe. The assertion has been made of his birthplace, Hayes Barton, although it is very doubtful if he ever visited the place after his parents left it, some years before their son had become acquainted with tobacco; and also with more plausibility of his home at Youghal, in the south of Ireland. Froude, in one of his "Short Studies," quotes a legend to the effect that Raleigh smoked on a rock below the Manor House of Greenaway, on the River Dart, which was the home of the first husband of Katherine Champernowne, afterwards Raleigh's wife; and Devonshire guide-books have adopted the story.

From Chapter 8:
The allusion in these verses to a "satiric wipe" refers to a passage in the poem entitled "Conversation," which Cowper had written in the previous year, 1781. In this passage tobacco is abused in terms which Cowper clearly felt to need modification after his personal intercourse with such a smoker as his friend Bull. In describing, in "Conversation," the manner in which a story is sometimes told, the poet says:

The pipe, with solemn interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause and puff—and speak, and pause again.
Such often, like the tube they so admire,
Important triflers! have more smoke than fire.