ne of the first dancers at the
Italian Opera House, and _maitre de ballet_ at Drury Lane Theatre.
This gentleman was addicted to self-indulgence, loved good eating, and
good and ample drinking, and moreover kept "late hours, _a
l'Anglaise_, smoked his pipe, and drank oceans of punch."

Coleridge, in the "Biographia Literaria," gives an amusing account of
his own experience of an attempt to smoke in company with a party of
tradesmen. In 1795 he was travelling about the country endeavouring to
secure subscriptions to the periodical publication he had started
called _The Watchman_. At Birmingham one day he dined with a worthy
tradesman, who, after dinner, importuned him "to smoke a pipe with
him, and two or three other _illuminati_ of the same rank." The
remainder of the moving story must be told in Coleridge's own words.
"I objected," he says, "both because I was engaged to spend the
evening with a minister and his friends, and because I had never
smoked except once or twice in my life-time, and then it was herb
tobacco mixed with Oronooko. On the assurance, however, that the
tobacco was equally mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow
colour,--not forgetting the lamentable difficulty I have always
experienced in saying, 'No,' and in abstaining from what the people
about me were doing,--I took half a pipe, filling the lower half of
the bole with salt. I was soon, however, compelled to resign it, in
consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my eyes, which,
as I had drunk but a single glass of ale, must, I knew, have been the
effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming myself recovered, I sallied
forth to my engagement; but the walk and the fresh air brought on all
the symptoms again, and I had scarcely entered the minister's
drawing-room, and opened a small pacquet of letters, which he had
received from Bristol for me, ere I sank back on the sofa in a sort of
swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to
inform him of the confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion.
For here and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing,
deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it
from my forehead, while one after another there dropped in the
different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend the
evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the
poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from
insensibility, and l