it was said
that smoking was the cause of his death: he was the son of an Irish
earl, and an attache at our embassy in Paris. But, alas! I have known
thousands who have been carried off owing to their love of the
bottle."

Thackeray, as the satirist of the foolish social prejudices against
smoking, was naturally an inveterate smoker himself. He died in 1863,
and so hardly saw the beginning of a change in the attitude of
society towards the pestilent weed; but he was one of the many men of
letters and artists, who, despising the conventions of society, were
largely instrumental in breaking down stupid restrictions, and in
overcoming senseless prejudices, and were thus heralds of freedom.
Charles Keene's attitude was that of many artists. He smoked a little
Jacobean clay pipe in his "sky-parlour" overlooking the Strand, and
did not care in the least what the world might think or not think
about that or any other subject.

Those who smoked pipes at Cambridge continued to smoke pipes
afterwards, whatever "society" might do. Spedding, who spent his life
on the elucidation of Bacon, was one of the "Apostles," and he
continued a pipe-lover to the end. In 1832 we hear of Tennyson being
in London with him, and "smoking all the day."

Lady Ritchie, in "Tennyson and his Friends," says: "I can remember
vaguely, on one occasion through a cloud of smoke, looking across a
darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet Laureate. He was
sitting with my Father in the twilight after some family meal in the
old house in Kensington." Thackeray was a cigar-smoker, but Tennyson
was a devotee of the pipe. It was on this occasion, as the poet
himself reminded Thackeray's daughter, that while the novelist was
speaking, Lady Ritchie's little sister "looked up suddenly from the
book over which she had been absorbed, saying in her sweet childish
voice, 'Papa, why do you not write books like 'Nicholas Nickleby'?'"

Tennyson wrote "In Memoriam" at Shawell Rectory, near Lutterworth,
Leicestershire. The rector was a Mr. Elmhirst, a native of the poet's
Lincolnshire village. The latest historian of Lutterworth says that
"The great puffs of tobacco smoke with which he [Tennyson] mellowed
his thoughts, proved insufferable to his host, and he was accordingly
turned out into Mr. Elmhirst's workshop in the garden, which in
consequence became the birthplace of one of the gems of English
literature."

About 1842, when Tennyson often dined at the Ol