Charles Lamb was a heavy pipe-smoker.  He smoked too much—­regretted it—­but continued to smoke, not wisely but too well.  “He came home very smoky and drinky last night,” says his sister of him.

When sending some books to Coleridge at Keswick in November 1802, Lamb wrote—­“If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right Gloucester, blacked in 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, Parr far outsmoked Lamb.  If the essayist discontinued or modified his smoking habits, he made up for it by devotion to snuff—­a devotion which his sister shared.  A large snuff-box usually lay on the table between them, and they pushed it one to the other.