Other men of letters of the time were zealous adherents of the pipe. One of these was the poet Campbell. From 1820 to 1830 he was editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_, and is reputed to have been so very unbusinesslike in his methods that there was always difficulty in getting proofs corrected and returned in good time. On one occasion, as reported by a member of the firm that printed the magazine, a proof had been lost, and the poet was informed that the article must go to press next day uncorrected. Campbell sent word that he would look in in the morning and correct it. Preparations were duly made to receive him; he was shown into the best room, and left with the proof on his table. After a while he rang the bell, and said, "I could do this much better if I had a pipe." Thereupon pipe and tobacco were procured and taken in to him. Campbell tore open the paper containing the tobacco, and, with a slightly contemptuous expression, exclaimed, "Ugh! C'naster! I'd rather it had been shag!" Charles Lamb was a heavy pipe-smoker. He smoked too much--regretted it--but continued to smoke, not wisely but too well. "He came home very smoky and drinky last night," says his sister of him. When sending some books to Coleridge at Keswick in November 1802, Lamb wrote--"If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right Gloucester, blacked in the candle (my usual supper), or peradventure, a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the crevices, look to that passage more especially: depend upon it, it contains good matter." To Lamb, a book read best over a pipe. The following year he wrote to Coleridge--"What do you think of smoking? I want your sober, _average, noon opinion_, of it. I generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it. Morning is a girl, and can't smoke--she's no evidence one way or the other; and Night is so evidently _bought over_, he can't be a very upright judge. Maybe the truth is that _one_ pipe is wholesome, _two_ pipes toothsome, _three_ pipes noisome, _four_ pipes fulsome, _five_ pipes quarrelsome, and that's the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason.... After all, our instincts may be best." It is clear from one or two references, that Lamb and Coleridge had been accustomed to smoke together at their meetings in early days at the "Salutation and Cat"--with less disastrous results to Coleridge, it is to be hoped, than those which followed his Birmingham smoke, as set forth in the preceding chapter.