'Well,'
he would say, on meeting me, glancing down at his portly person, and
opening wide his arms, with a cigar in his fingers, 'doesn't it pay to
smoke? How does _this_ look? The coming man may do as he likes;
but the man of the present finds it salutary."' Commenting on Mr.
Taylor's early death, Mr. Parton points out that some fifty New York
journalists have either died in their prime or before reaching their
prime. A similar mortality, he notes, has been observed in England.
Dickens died at 58, and Thackeray at 52. A "great number of lesser
lights have been extinguished that promised to burn with
long-increasing brightness." Mr. Parton asks, "Is there anything in
mental labour hostile to life? Was it over-work that shortened the
lives of these valuable and interesting men?" He thinks not, but that
they died before their time because they did not know how to live.
Like Carlyle, William Howitt was scandalised by the tippling habits of
some of the literary men whom he met, and equally scandalised by their
smoking habits. Replying to a correspondent who urged that most
literary men and artists smoke, he said, "No doubt; and that is what
makes the lives of literary men and artists comparatively so short.
May not too much joviality and too much smoking have a good deal to do
with it? I myself, who have not smoked for these seventy years, have
seen nearly the whole generation of my literary contemporaries pass
away.
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