Sincere, affectionate, loving Charles Lamb, whose child-like heart, so easily touched with the sufferings of others, was full of chivalrous devotion to the sufferer. He turns to Wordsworth and explains his attitude towards the weed. ‘Tobacco was for years my evening comfort and my morning curse. For two years I had it in my head to write a poem on the charmer, but she stood in her own light by giving me headaches that prevented me singing her praises.’
‘But, my worthy Lamb, you know that headaches come not so much of smoking as of imbibing too freely of that cheery October you like so well? And what strong coarse stuff you would smoke to be sure! Do you remember that even Dr. Parr was amazed at your prodigious powers, and asked how you had acquired the habit?’
‘Ah, yes, I remember, I told him I had acquired it,’ (and here a sparkle of humour plays across his face) ‘by toiling after it, as some men toil after virtue.’
‘And when your physician wisely admonished you, and would have stopped further indulgence in the weed, at least for a time, confess, naughty man, what was your reply?’
‘May my last breath be drawn through a pipe and exhaled in a pun! And yet I would readily admit that,
For thy sake, tobacco, I
Would do anything but die!’
The eloquent Robert Hall, England’s greatest pulpit orator, takes up the social theme and recounts his first experience of the pipe. ‘My association with the fraternity of smokers happened when I was a young man at Cambridge under the guidance and somewhat severe admonition of the learned Dr. Parr, whose pre-eminence among smokers we all acknowledged. Thus early in life brought under the soothing influence of the weed by so profound a scholar, whose knowledge of Greek was the terror and admiration of young men, and feeling the natural desire of youth to imitate the great, I thought I could not in any better way fit myself for his society than by adopting his habit of smoking, and out of a long clay pipe like his. It was then I developed a taste for tobacco which from that time onward never left me. Being pressed on one occasion to explain why I began the practice, I made answer that I was qualifying myself for the society of a Doctor of Divinity, and that my pipe was the test of my admission. Indeed, I began to experience an ill-at-ease feeling whenever the weed and its instrument were not within my reach. I did not care to argue with those people who thought evil things of smoking. If they did not like it I would merely advise them to keep from it. For myself, I was perfectly contented if they would let me alone, and allow me the mild indulgence during my sojourn among mortals.’