n the candle (my usual
supper), or peradventure, a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the
crevices, look to that passage more especially: depend upon it, it
contains good matter." To Lamb, a book read best over a pipe.

The following year he wrote to Coleridge--"What do you think of
smoking? I want your sober, _average, noon opinion_, of it. I
generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it.
Morning is a girl, and can't smoke--she's no evidence one way or the
other; and Night is so evidently _bought over_, he can't be a very
upright judge. Maybe the truth is that _one_ pipe is wholesome, _two_
pipes toothsome, _three_ pipes noisome, _four_ pipes fulsome, _five_
pipes quarrelsome, and that's the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding
rather upon rhyme than reason.... After all, our instincts may be
best." It is clear from one or two references, that Lamb and Coleridge
had been accustomed to smoke together at their meetings in early days
at the "Salutation and Cat"--with less disastrous results to
Coleridge, it is to be hoped, than those which followed his Birmingham
smoke, as set forth in the preceding chapter.

In 1805 Lamb wrote to Wordsworth--"now I have bid farewell to my
'sweet enemy' tobacco ... I shall, perhaps, set nobly to work."
Forthwith he set to work on the farce "Mr. H.," which some months
later was produced at Drury Lane and was promptly damned. After its
failure Lamb wrote to Hazlitt--"We are determined not to be cast down.
I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man
must write smoky farces." But Lamb and his pipe were not to be parted
by even repeated resolutions to leave off smoking. It was years after
this that he met Macready at Talfourd's, and by way probably of saying
something to shock Macready; whose personality could hardly have been
sympathetic to him, uttered the remarkable wish that the last breath
he drew in might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.

It was in 1818 that Lamb published the collection of his writings, in
two volumes, which contained the well-known "Farewell to Tobacco,"
written in 1805, and referred to in the letter of that year to
Wordsworth quoted above. Its phrases of mingled abuse and affection
are familiar to lovers of Lamb.

Parr is reported to have once asked Lamb how he could smoke so much
and so fast, and Lamb is said to have replied--"I toiled after it,
sir, as some men toil after virtue." But if all accounts are true,
Par