Lamb sent this poem to Manning in March, 1803--"I send you some verses I have made on the death of a young Quaker you may have heard me speak of as being in love with for some years while I lived at Pentonville, though I had never spoken to her in my life. She died about a month since." Hester Savory was the daughter of Joseph Savory, a goldsmith in the Strand. She was born in 1777 and was thus by two years Lamb's junior. She married, in July, 1802, Charles Stoke Dudley, a merchant, and she died in February of the following year, and was buried at Bunhill Fields. Lamb was living in Pentonville from the end of 1796 until 1799. * * * * * Page 33. _Dialogue between a Mother and Child._ By Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb, writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on June 2, 1804, says: "I send you two little copies of verses by Mary L--b." Then follow this "Dialogue" and the "Lady Blanch" verses on page 41. Lamb adds at the end: "I wish they may please you: we in these parts are not a little proud of them." * * * * * Page 34. _A Farewell to Tobacco._ First printed in _The Reflector_, No. IV., 1811. Lamb had begun to think poetically of tobacco as early as 1803. Writing to Coleridge in April 13 of that year, he says:--"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_, that he can't be a very upright judge. May be 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." Writing to William and Dorothy Wordsworth on September 28, 1805, Lamb remarked regarding his literary plans:--"Sometimes I think of a farce--but hitherto all schemes have gone off,--an idle brag or two of an evening vaporing out of a pipe, and going off in the morning--but now I have bid farewell to my 'Sweet Enemy' Tobacco, as you will see in my next page, I perhaps shall set soberly to work. Hang work!" On the next page Lamb copied the "Farewell to Tobacco," adding:--"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: and you know how difficult it is from refraining to pick one's lips even when it has become a habit. This Poem is the only one which I have finished since so long as when I wrote 'Hester Savory' [in March, 1803].... The 'Tobacco,' being a little in the way of Withers (whom Southey so much likes), perhaps you will somehow convey it to him with my kind remembrances."