Tobacco and Genius 249 



His great rival, Beaconsfield, knew the virtues of a 

 cigar. 



Macaulay, De Quincey, and Shelley are among the 

 notable non-smokers of this century. Legal lumi- 

 naries, like Eldon, Stowell, and Brougham, smoked. 

 Buckle, the historian of civilization, used to smoke 

 three cigars a day as a mental stimulus. Smoked, 

 too, did De Musset, Eugene Sue, Prosper Merim^e, 

 and ' George Sands.' 



In his youth Charles Dickens took snuff, abandon- 

 ing it in later life for tobacco in its better form of 

 smoke. His great contemporay, Thackeray, likewise 

 loved tobacco, and smoked while working. Cruick- 

 shank was once an inveterate smoker, but — mirabile 

 dictu ! — renounced and preached against the weed in 

 his latter years. 



Charles Kingsley loved tobacco, as his forceful 

 eulogy in ' Westward Ho !' proclaims. He could not 

 work long without smoking. Long churchwardens 

 were his favourite ' wanity,' and these he kept in 

 all sorts of convenient places. In a stroll round 

 the garden he would produce one from a fruit-tree or 

 some odd corner, and light up to blow a cloud. 



Tennyson's passion for a long clay is well known. 

 He smoked Milos and afterwards Dublin clays ; mild 

 bird's-eye was his favourite tobacco. The story that 

 he never smoked the same pipe twice is absurd, for, 

 like all smokers, he detested new pipes. ' I take my 

 pipe,' he wrote to a friend in 1842, 'and the muse 

 descends in the fume, not like your modern ladies, who 

 shriek at a pipe as if they saw a " splackmuck." Do 

 you know what a " splackmuck " is }' (the Brobding- 



