last dying speech, and there is but a drop left in the
beaker.

'I'll not leave thee, thou lone drop!
'Twould be mighty unkind,
Since the rest I have swallow'd,
To leave thee behind.'

"Final exhortation. Choose the small, sound, tolerably firm,
and elastic cigar: the dwarf contains stuff within which the
giant hath not. Don't flatter yourself you're smoking
cabbage, if not tobacco--its any odds on rhubarb!

'For me there's nothing new or rare,
Till wine deceives my brain;
And that, I think, 's a reason fair
To fill my pipe again.'"

Charles Lamb, "the gentle Elia" was during a portion of his
lifetime a famous smoker. In a letter to Hazlitt he writes,
"I am so smoky with last night's ten pipes, that I must
leave off." It is said that he smoked only the coarsest and
strongest he could procure. Dr. Parr inquired of him how he
acquired his "prodigious smoking powers." "I toiled after
it, sir," was the reply, "as some men toil after virtue!"
Lamb was constant in his use of tobacco, and among all the
great luminaries of English literature we know of none more
addicted to the use of the pipe. Lamb might often be seen in
his chambers in Mitre Court Building, puffing the coarsest
weed from a long clay pipe, in company with Parr who used
the finest kind of tobacco in a pipe half filled with salt.
It was no easy task to relinquish the use of tobacco and it
cost him many a struggle and much determined effort. In
writing to Wordsworth he says:--"I wish you may think this a
handsome farewell to my 'Friendly Traitress.' Tobacco has
been my evening comfort and my morning curse for these five
years. I have had it in my head to do it (Farewell to
Tobacco) these two years; but tobacco stood in its own light
when it gave me headaches that prevented my singing its
praises."

Lamb's poem is without doubt one of the finest pieces of verse ever
written on tobacco, and seemingly contains both words of praise and
dispraise--the latter however in some sense are insincere.

"May the Babylonish curse
Straight confound my stammering verse
If I can a passage see
In this word-perplexity,
Or a fit expression find,
Or a language to my mind,
(Still the phrase is wide or scant,)
To take le