My Friend George Cayley Had A Couple Of Dingy Little Rooms
Between Parliament Street And The River.
Much of my time was
spent there with him.
One night after dinner, quite late, we
were building castles amidst tobacco clouds, when, following
a 'May I come in?' Tennyson made his appearance. This was
the first time I had ever met him. We gave him the only
armchair in the room; and pulling out his dudeen and placing
afoot on each side of the hob of the old-fashioned little
grate, he made himself comfortable before he said another
word. He then began to talk of pipes and tobacco. And
never, I should say, did this important topic afford so much
ingenious conversation before. We discussed the relative
merits of all the tobaccos in the world - of moist tobacco
and dry tobacco, of old tobacco and new tobacco, of clay
pipes and wooden pipes and meerschaum pipes. What was the
best way to colour them, the advantages of colouring them,
the beauty of the 'culotte,' the coolness it gave to the
smoke, &c. We listened to the venerable sage - he was then
forty-three and we only five or six and twenty - as we should
have listened to a Homer or an Aristotle, and he thoroughly
enjoyed our appreciation of his jokes.
Some of them would have startled such of his admirers who
knew him only by his poems; for his stories were anything but
poetical - rather humorous one might say, on the whole.
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