d Cock (by Temple Bar)
and at other taverns, the perfect dinner for his taste, says his son,
was "a beef-steak, a potato, a cut of cheese, a pint of port, and
afterwards a pipe (never a cigar)." When the Kingsleys paid the
Tennysons a visit about 1859, Charles Kingsley, so the Laureate told
his son, "talked as usual on all sorts of topics, and walked hard up
and down the study for hours smoking furiously, and affirming that
tobacco was the only thing that kept his nerves quiet." The late
Laureate, Alfred Austin, once asked Tennyson, after reading a passage
in Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journal" that William had gone to bed "very
tired" with writing the "Prelude," if he had ever felt tired by
writing poetry. "I think not," said the poet, "but tired with the
accompaniment of too much smoking."

Kingsley's devotion to smoke seems to have surprised Tennyson, who was
no light smoker himself. The most curious story illustrating
Kingsley's love of tobacco is that told in the life of Archbishop
Benson by his son, Mr. A.C. Benson. One day about the year 1860, the
future archbishop was walking with the Rector of Eversley in a remote
part of the parish, on a common, when Kingsley suddenly said--"I must
smoke a pipe," and forthwith went to a furze-bush and felt about in it
for a time. Presently he produced a clay churchwarden pipe, "which he
lighted, and solemnly smoked as he walked, putting it when he had done
into a hole among some tree roots, and telling my father that he had a
_cache_ of pipes in several places in the parish to meet the
exigencies of a sudden desire for tobacco." If this story did not
appear in the life of an archbishop, some scepticism on the part of
the reader might be excused.

Carlyle, as every one knows, was a great smoker. The story is
familiar--it may be true--that one evening he and Tennyson sat in
solemn silence smoking for hours, one on each side of the fireplace,
and that when the visitor rose to go, Carlyle, as he bade him
good-night, said--"Man, Alfred, we hae had a graund nicht; come again
soon."

Tennyson's own devotion to tobacco led, on at least one occasion, to a
peculiar and somewhat questionable proceeding. Mr. W.M. Rossetti had a
temporary acquaintance with the poet, and in the "Reminiscences" which
he published in 1906, he told a curious anecdote concerning him which
was new to print. Rossetti told, on the authority of Woolner, how, in
the course of a trip with friends to Italy, tobacco suc