14 G TOBACCO IN EUROPE. 



sermon from either. "In many cases of religious 

 melancholy, where long prayers are ineffectual, great 

 relief may often be expected from a pipe. The late 

 Kev. Robert Hall of Leicester, a truly pious man, and 

 from his talents an honour to the religious community 

 to which he belonged, found in a pipe a remedy for the 

 melancholy with which he was afflicted in his younger 

 years."* The celebrated Dr. Parr is the greatest 

 modern example of an excessive smoker. He smoked 

 continually in season and out of it, even in company 

 of ladies, and in their drawing-rooms ; he insisted in 

 the indulgence wherever he went, and generally picked 

 out some young lady to light his pipe after dinner. 

 He sometimes smoked twenty pipes in an evening, and 

 he never wrote well without tobacco ; he describes him- 

 self as composing his works " and rolling volcanic 

 fumes of tobacco to the ceiling." Dr. Richardson, in his 

 Recollections of the last Half -Century, tells us that Dr. 

 Parr, at the dinner given at Trinity College to the Duke 

 of Gloucester as Chancellor of the University of Cam- 

 bridge, upon the removal of the cloth, indulged in his 

 eternal pipe, " blowing a cloud into the faces of his 

 neighbours, much to their annoyance, and causing 

 royalty to sneeze by the stimulating stench of 

 mundungus." This is certainly no example for a 

 decent smoker to follow ; but as Parr lived to the ripe 

 age of seventy-eight, it is a pretty good proof that the 

 immoderate use of tobacco is not very fatal. 



* A Paper of Tobacco, p. 74. 



