y to work. Hang work!"

On the next page Lamb copied the "Farewell to Tobacco," adding:--"I wish
you may think this a handsome farewell to my 'Friendly Traitress.'
Tobacco has been my evening comfort and my morning curse for these five
years: and you know how difficult it is from refraining to pick one's
lips even when it has become a habit. This Poem is the only one which I
have finished since so long as when I wrote 'Hester Savory' [in March,
1803].... The 'Tobacco,' being a little in the way of Withers (whom
Southey so much likes), perhaps you will somehow convey it to him with
my kind remembrances."

Mr. Bertram Dobell has a MS. copy of the poem, in Lamb's hand, inscribed
thus: "To his _quondam_ Brethren of the Pipe, Capt. B[urney], and J[ohn]
R[ickman], Esq., the Author dedicates this his last Farewell to
Tobacco." At the end is a rude drawing of a pipe broken--"My Emblem."

It is perhaps hardly needful to say that Lamb's farewell was not final.
He did not give up smoking for many years. When asked (Talfourd's
version of the story says by Dr. Parr) how he was able to emit such
volumes of smoke, he replied, "I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil
after virtue;" and Macready records having heard Lamb express the wish
to draw his last breath through a pipe and exhale it in a pun. Talfourd
says that in late life Lamb ceased to smoke except very occasionally.
But the late Mrs. Coe, who knew Lamb at Widford when she was a child,
told me that she remembered Lamb's black pipe and his devotion to it,
about 1830.

In his character sketch of the late Elia (see Vol. II.), written in
1822, Lamb describes the effect of tobacco upon himself. "He took it, he
would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry--as the friendly vapour
ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the
ligaments, which tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer
proceeded a statist!"

* * * * *

Page 38. _To T.L.H_.

First printed in _The Examiner_, January 1, 1815.

The lines are to Thornton Leigh Hunt, Leigh Hunt's little boy, who was
born in 1810, and, during his father's imprisonment for a libel on the
Regent from February, 1813, to February, 1815, was much in the Surrey
gaol. Lamb, who was among Hunt's constant visitors, probably first saw
him there. Lamb mentions him again in his _Elia_ essay "Witches and
other Night Fears." See also note to the "Letter to Southey," Vol. I.
Thornton Leigh Hu