Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 8:

The allusion in these verses to a "satiric wipe" refers to a passage in the poem entitled "Conversation," which Cowper had written in the previous year, 1781. In this passage tobacco is abused in terms which Cowper clearly felt to need modification after his personal intercourse with such a smoker as his friend Bull. In describing, in "Conversation," the manner in which a story is sometimes told, the poet says:

The pipe, with solemn interposing puff,
Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
Then pause and puff—and speak, and pause again.
Such often, like the tube they so admire,
Important triflers! have more smoke than fire.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

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.

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