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Thomas De Quincey


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Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

by Thomas De Quincey

January, 2000 [Etext #2040]


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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1886 George Routledge and Sons edition.  This being a reprint
of the 1821 London Magazine edition.





Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey.  The
first edition (London Magazine) text.  1886 George Routledge and
Sons edition.





CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER:
BEING AN EXTRACT FROM THE
LIFE OF A SCHOLAR.
From the "London Magazine" for September 1821.




TO THE READER



I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a
remarkable period in my life:  according to my application of it, I
trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a
considerable degree useful and instructive.  In THAT hope it is that
I have drawn it up; and THAT must be my apology for breaking through
that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part,
restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and
infirmities.  Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings
than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his
moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that "decent drapery" which
time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them;
accordingly, the greater part of OUR confessions (that is,
spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps,
adventurers, or swindlers:  and for any such acts of gratuitous
self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the
decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to French
literature, or to that part of the German which is tainted with the
spurious and defective sensibility of the French.  All this I feel
so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this
tendency, that I have for many months hesitated about the propriety
of allowing this or any part of my narrative to come before the
public eye until after my death (when, for many reasons, the whole
will be published); and it is not without an anxious review of the
reasons for and against this step that I have at last concluded on
taking it.

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice:
they court privacy and solitude:  and even in their choice of a
grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general
population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship
with the great family of man, and wishing (in the affecting language
of Mr. Wordsworth)


Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.


It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that it
should be so:  nor would I willingly in my own person manifest a
disregard of such salutary feelings, nor in act or word do anything
to weaken them; but, on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not
amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible
that, if it DID, the benefit resulting to others from the record of
an experience purchased at so heavy a price might compensate, by a
vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I have
noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule.  Infirmity and
misery do not of necessity imply guilt.  They approach or recede
from shades of that dark alliance, in proportion to the probable
motives and prospects of the offender, and the palliations, known or
secret, of the offence; in proportion as the temptations to it were
potent from the first, and the resistance to it, in act or in
effort, was earnest to the last.  For my own part, without breach of
truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole,
the life of a philosopher:  from my birth I was made an intellectual
creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and
pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days.  If opium-eating
be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have
indulged in it to an excess not yet RECORDED {1} of any other man,
it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating
enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished
what I never yet heard attributed to any other man--have untwisted,
almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.
Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to
any kind or degree of self-indulgence.  Not to insist that in my
case the self-conquest was unquestionable, the self-indulgence open
to doubts of casuistry, according as that name shall be extended to
acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall be restricted to
such as aim at the excitement of positive pleasure.

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and if I did, it is possible
that I might still resolve on the present act of confession in
consideration of the service which I may thereby render to the whole
class of opium-eaters.  But who are they?  Reader, I am sorry to say
a very numerous class indeed.  Of this I became convinced some years
ago by computing at that time the number of those in one small class
of English society (the class of men distinguished for talents, or
of eminent station) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, as
opium-eaters; such, for instance, as the eloquent and benevolent -,
the late Dean of -, Lord -, Mr.--the philosopher, a late Under-
Secretary of State (who described to me the sensation which first
drove him to the use of opium in the very same words as the Dean of
-, viz., "that he felt as though rats were gnawing and abrading the
coats of his stomach"), Mr. -, and many others hardly less known,
whom it would be tedious to mention.  Now, if one class,
comparatively so limited, could furnish so many scores of cases (and
THAT within the knowledge of one single inquirer), it was a natural
inference that the entire population of England would furnish a
proportionable number.  The soundness of this inference, however, I
doubted, until some facts became known to me which satisfied me that
it was not incorrect.  I will mention two.  (1) Three respectable
London druggists, in widely remote quarters of London, from whom I
happened lately to be purchasing small quantities of opium, assured
me that the number of AMATEUR opium-eaters (as I may term them) was
at this time immense; and that the difficulty of distinguishing
those persons to whom habit had rendered opium necessary from such
as were purchasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned them daily
trouble and disputes.  This evidence respected London only.  But
(2)--which will possibly surprise the reader more--some years ago,
on passing through Manchester, I was informed by several cotton
manufacturers that their workpeople were rapidly getting into the
practice of opium-eating; so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon
the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two,
or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening.
The immediate occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages,
which at that time would not allow them to indulge in ale or
spirits, and wages rising, it may be thought that this practice
would cease; but as I do not readily believe that any man having
once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will afterwards descend to
the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted


That those eat now who never ate before;
And those who always ate, now eat the more.


Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are admitted even by medical
writers, who are its greatest enemies.  Thus, for instance, Awsiter,
apothecary to Greenwich Hospital, in his "Essay on the Effects of
Opium" (published in the year 1763), when attempting to explain why
Mead had not been sufficiently explicit on the properties,
counteragents, &c., of this drug, expresses himself in the following
mysterious terms ([Greek text]):  "Perhaps he thought the subject of
too delicate a nature to be made common; and as many people might
then indiscriminately use it, it would take from that necessary fear
and caution which should prevent their experiencing the extensive
power of this drug, FOR THERE ARE MANY PROPERTIES IN IT, IF
UNIVERSALLY KNOWN, THAT WOULD HABITUATE THE USE, AND MAKE IT MORE IN
REQUEST WITH US THAN WITH TURKS THEMSELVES; the result of which
knowledge," he adds, "must prove a general misfortune."  In the
necessity of this conclusion I do not altogether concur; but upon
that point I shall have occasion to speak at the close of my
Confessions, where I shall present the reader with the MORAL of my
narrative.



PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS



These preliminary confessions, or introductory narrative of the
youthful adventures which laid the foundation of the writer's habit
of opium-eating in after-life, it has been judged proper to premise,
for three several reasons:

1.  As forestalling that question, and giving it a satisfactory
answer, which else would painfully obtrude itself in the course of
the Opium Confessions--"How came any reasonable being to subject
himself to such a yoke of misery; voluntarily to incur a captivity
so servile, and knowingly to fetter himself with such a sevenfold
chain?"--a question which, if not somewhere plausibly resolved,
could hardly fail, by the indignation which it would be apt to raise
as against an act of wanton folly, to interfere with that degree of
sympathy which is necessary in any case to an author's purposes.

2.  As furnishing a key to some parts of that tremendous scenery
which afterwards peopled the dreams of the Opium-eater.

3.  As creating some previous interest of a personal sort in the
confessing subject, apart from the matter of the confessions, which
cannot fail to render the confessions themselves more interesting.
If a man "whose talk is of oxen" should become an opium-eater, the
probability is that (if he is not too dull to dream at all) he will
dream about oxen; whereas, in the case before him, the reader will
find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher; and
accordingly, that the phantasmagoria of HIS dreams (waking or
sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams) is suitable to one who in that
character


Humani nihil a se alienum putat.


For amongst the conditions which he deems indispensable to the
sustaining of any claim to the title of philosopher is not merely
the possession of a superb intellect in its ANALYTIC functions (in
which part of the pretensions, however, England can for some
generations show but few claimants; at least, he is not aware of any
known candidate for this honour who can be styled emphatically A
SUBTLE THINKER, with the exception of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, and
in a narrower department of thought with the recent illustrious
exception {2} of DAVID RICARDO) but also on such a constitution of
the MORAL faculties as shall give him an inner eye and power of
intuition for the vision and the mysteries of our human nature:
THAT constitution of faculties, in short, which (amongst all the
generations of men that from the beginning of time have deployed
into life, as it were, upon this planet) our English poets have
possessed in the highest degree, and Scottish professors {3} in the
lowest.

I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium-
eater, and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my
acquaintance from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the
sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of
indulgence in this practice purely for the sake of creating an
artificial state of pleasurable excitement.  This, however, is a
misrepresentation of my case.  True it is that for nearly ten years
I did occasionally take opium for the sake of the exquisite pleasure
it gave me; but so long as I took it with this view I was
effectually protected from all material bad consequences by the
necessity of interposing long intervals between the several acts of
indulgence, in order to renew the pleasurable sensations.  It was
not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in
the severest degree, that I first began to use opium as an article
of daily diet.  In the twenty-eighth year of my age a most painful
affection of the stomach, which I had first experienced about ten
years before, attacked me in great strength.  This affection had
originally been caused by extremities of hunger, suffered in my
boyish days.  During the season of hope and redundant happiness
which succeeded (that is, from eighteen to twenty-four) it had
slumbered; for the three following years it had revived at
intervals; and now, under unfavourable circumstances, from
depression of spirits, it attacked me with a violence that yielded
to no remedies but opium.  As the youthful sufferings which first
produced this derangement of the stomach were interesting in
themselves, and in the circumstances that attended them, I shall
here briefly retrace them.

My father died when I was about seven years old, and left me to the
care of four guardians.  I was sent to various schools, great and
small; and was very early distinguished for my classical
attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek.  At thirteen I
wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen my command of that language
was so great that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres,
but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment--an
accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my
times, and which in my case was owing to the practice of daily
reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish
extempore; for the necessity of ransacking my memory and invention
for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions as
equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of things, &c., gave
me a compass of diction which would never have been called out by a
dull translation of moral essays, &c.  "That boy," said one of my
masters, pointing the attention of a stranger to me, "that boy could
harangue an Athenian mob better than you and I could address an
English one."  He who honoured me with this eulogy was a scholar,
"and a ripe and a good one," and of all my tutors was the only one
whom I loved or reverenced.  Unfortunately for me (and, as I
afterwards learned, to this worthy man's great indignation), I was
transferred to the care, first of a blockhead, who was in a
perpetual panic lest I should expose his ignorance; and finally to
that of a respectable scholar at the head of a great school on an
ancient foundation.  This man had been appointed to his situation
by--College, Oxford, and was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like
most men whom I have known from that college) coarse, clumsy, and
inelegant.  A miserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to the
Etonian brilliancy of my favourite master; and beside, he could not
disguise from my hourly notice the poverty and meagreness of his
understanding.  It is a bad thing for a boy to be and to know
himself far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or in power of
mind.  This was the case, so far as regarded knowledge at least, not
with myself only, for the two boys, who jointly with myself composed
the first form, were better Grecians than the head-master, though
not more elegant scholars, nor at all more accustomed to sacrifice
to the Graces.  When I first entered I remember that we read
Sophocles; and it was a constant matter of triumph to us, the
learned triumvirate of the first form, to see our "Archididascalus"
(as he loved to be called) conning our lessons before we went up,
and laying a regular train, with lexicon and grammar, for blowing up
and blasting (as it were) any difficulties he found in the choruses;
whilst WE never condescended to open our books until the moment of
going up, and were generally employed in writing epigrams upon his
wig or some such important matter.  My two class-fellows were poor,
and dependent for their future prospects at the university on the
recommendation of the head-master; but I, who had a small
patrimonial property, the income of which was sufficient to support
me at college, wished to be sent thither immediately.  I made
earnest representations on the subject to my guardians, but all to
no purpose.  One, who was more reasonable and had more knowledge of
the world than the rest, lived at a distance; two of the other three
resigned all their authority into the hands of the fourth; and this
fourth, with whom I had to negotiate, was a worthy man in his way,
but haughty, obstinate, and intolerant of all opposition to his
will.  After a certain number of letters and personal interviews, I
found that I had nothing to hope for, not even a compromise of the
matter, from my guardian.  Unconditional submission was what he
demanded, and I prepared myself, therefore, for other measures.
Summer was now coming on with hasty steps, and my seventeenth
birthday was fast approaching, after which day I had sworn within
myself that I would no longer be numbered amongst schoolboys.  Money
being what I chiefly wanted, I wrote to a woman of high rank, who,
though young herself, had known me from a child, and had latterly
treated me with great distinction, requesting that she would "lend"
me five guineas.  For upwards of a week no answer came, and I was
beginning to despond, when at length a servant put into my hands a
double letter with a coronet on the seal.  The letter was kind and
obliging.  The fair writer was on the sea-coast, and in that way the
delay had arisen; she enclosed double of what I had asked, and good-
naturedly hinted that if I should NEVER repay her, it would not
absolutely ruin her.  Now, then, I was prepared for my scheme.  Ten
guineas, added to about two which I had remaining from my pocket-
money, seemed to me sufficient for an indefinite length of time; and
at that happy age, if no DEFINITE boundary can be assigned to one's
power, the spirit of hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite.

It is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's (and, what cannot often be said
of his remarks, it is a very feeling one), that we never do anything
consciously for the last time (of things, that is, which we have
long been in the habit of doing) without sadness of heart.  This
truth I felt deeply when I came to leave -, a place which I did not
love, and where I had not been happy.  On the evening before I left-
-for ever, I grieved when the ancient and lofty schoolroom resounded
with the evening service, performed for the last time in my hearing;
and at night, when the muster-roll of names was called over, and
mine (as usual) was called first, I stepped forward, and passing the
head-master, who was standing by, I bowed to him, and looked
earnestly in his face, thinking to myself, "He is old and infirm,
and in this world I shall not see him again."  I was right; I never
DID see him again, nor ever shall.  He looked at me complacently,
smiled good-naturedly, returned my salutation (or rather my
valediction), and we parted (though he knew it not) for ever.  I
could not reverence him intellectually, but he had been uniformly
kind to me, and had allowed me many indulgences; and I grieved at
the thought of the mortification I should inflict upon him.

The morning came which was to launch me into the world, and from
which my whole succeeding life has in many important points taken
its colouring.  I lodged in the head-master's house, and had been
allowed from my first entrance the indulgence of a private room,
which I used both as a sleeping-room and as a study.  At half after
three I rose, and gazed with deep emotion at the ancient towers of -
, "drest in earliest light," and beginning to crimson with the
radiant lustre of a cloudless July morning.  I was firm and
immovable in my purpose; but yet agitated by anticipation of
uncertain danger and troubles; and if I could have foreseen the
hurricane and perfect hail-storm of affliction which soon fell upon
me, well might I have been agitated.  To this agitation the deep
peace of the morning presented an affecting contrast, and in some
degree a medicine.  The silence was more profound than that of mid-
night; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching
than all other silence, because, the light being broad and strong as
that of noonday at other seasons of the year, it seems to differ
from perfect day chiefly because man is not yet abroad; and thus the
peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of God seems to be
secure and deep only so long as the presence of man and his restless
and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.  I dressed
myself, took my hat and gloves, and lingered a little in the room.
For the last year and a half this room had been my "pensive
citadel":  here I had read and studied through all the hours of
night, and though true it was that for the latter part of this time
I, who was framed for love and gentle affections, had lost my gaiety
and happiness during the strife and fever of contention with my
guardian, yet, on the other hand, as a boy so passionately fond of
books, and dedicated to intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to
have enjoyed many happy hours in the midst of general dejection.  I
wept as I looked round on the chair, hearth, writing-table, and
other familiar objects, knowing too certainly that I looked upon
them for the last time.  Whilst I write this it is eighteen years
ago, and yet at this moment I see distinctly, as if it were
yesterday, the lineaments and expression of the object on which I
fixed my parting gaze.  It was a picture of the lovely -, which hung
over the mantelpiece, the eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful,
and the whole countenance so radiant with benignity and divine
tranquillity, that I had a thousand times laid down my pen or my
book to gather consolation from it, as a devotee from his patron
saint.  Whilst I was yet gazing upon it the deep tones of--clock
proclaimed that it was four o'clock.  I went up to the picture,
kissed it, and then gently walked out and closed the door for ever!


So blended and intertwisted in this life are occasions of laughter
and of tears, that I cannot yet recall without smiling an incident
which occurred at that time, and which had nearly put a stop to the
immediate execution of my plan.  I had a trunk of immense weight,
for, besides my clothes, it contained nearly all my library.  The
difficulty was to get this removed to a carrier's:  my room was at
an aerial elevation in the house, and (what was worse) the staircase
which communicated with this angle of the building was accessible
only by a gallery, which passed the head-master's chamber door.  I
was a favourite with all the servants, and knowing that any of them
would screen me and act confidentially, I communicated my
embarrassment to a groom of the head-master's.  The groom swore he
would do anything I wished, and when the time arrived went upstairs
to bring the trunk down.  This I feared was beyond the strength of
any one man; however, the groom was a man


Of Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies;


and had a back as spacious as Salisbury Plain.  Accordingly he
persisted in bringing down the trunk alone, whilst I stood waiting
at the foot of the last flight in anxiety for the event.  For some
time I heard him descending with slow and firm steps; but
unfortunately, from his trepidation, as he drew near the dangerous
quarter, within a few steps of the gallery, his foot slipped, and
the mighty burden falling from his shoulders, gained such increase
of impetus at each step of the descent, that on reaching the bottom
it trundled, or rather leaped, right across, with the noise of
twenty devils, against the very bedroom door of the Archididascalus.
My first thought was that all was lost, and that my only chance for
executing a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage.  However, on
reflection I determined to abide the issue.  The groom was in the
utmost alarm, both on his own account and on mine, but, in spite of
this, so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous in this unhappy
contretemps taken possession of his fancy, that he sang out a long,
loud, and canorous peal of laughter, that might have wakened the
Seven Sleepers.  At the sound of this resonant merriment, within the
very ears of insulted authority, I could not myself forbear joining
in it; subdued to this, not so much by the unhappy etourderie of the
trunk, as by the effect it had upon the groom.  We both expected, as
a matter of course, that Dr.--would sally, out of his room, for in
general, if but a mouse stirred, he sprang out like a mastiff from
his kennel.  Strange to say, however, on this occasion, when the
noise of laughter had ceased, no sound, or rustling even, was to be
heard in the bedroom.  Dr.--had a painful complaint, which,
sometimes keeping him awake, made his sleep perhaps, when it did
come, the deeper.  Gathering courage from the silence, the groom
hoisted his burden again, and accomplished the remainder of his
descent without accident.  I waited until I saw the trunk placed on
a wheelbarrow and on its road to the carrier's; then, "with
Providence my guide," I set off on foot, carrying a small parcel
with some articles of dress under my arm; a favourite English poet
in one pocket, and a small 12mo volume, containing about nine plays
of Euripides, in the other.

It had been my intention originally to proceed to Westmoreland, both
from the love I bore to that country and on other personal accounts.
Accident, however, gave a different direction to my wanderings, and
I bent my steps towards North Wales.

After wandering about for some time in Denbighshire, Merionethshire,
and Carnarvonshire, I took lodgings in a small neat house in B-.
Here I might have stayed with great comfort for many weeks, for
provisions were cheap at B-, from the scarcity of other markets for
the surplus produce of a wide agricultural district.  An accident,
however, in which perhaps no offence was designed, drove me out to
wander again.  I know not whether my reader may have remarked, but I
have often remarked, that the proudest class of people in England
(or at any rate the class whose pride is most apparent) are the
families of bishops.  Noblemen and their children carry about with
them, in their very titles, a sufficient notification of their rank.
Nay, their very names (and this applies also to the children of many
untitled houses) are often, to the English ear, adequate exponents
of high birth or descent.  Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, Paulet,
Cavendish, and scores of others, tell their own tale.  Such persons,
therefore, find everywhere a due sense of their claims already
established, except among those who are ignorant of the world by
virtue of their own obscurity:  "Not to know THEM, argues one's self
unknown."  Their manners take a suitable tone and colouring, and for
once they find it necessary to impress a sense of their consequence
upon others, they meet with a thousand occasions for moderating and
tempering this sense by acts of courteous condescension.  With the
families of bishops it is otherwise:  with them, it is all uphill
work to make known their pretensions; for the proportion of the
episcopal bench taken from noble families is not at any time very
large, and the succession to these dignities is so rapid that the
public ear seldom has time to become familiar with them, unless
where they are connected with some literary reputation.  Hence it is
that the children of bishops carry about with them an austere and
repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a
sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too
familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty
man from all contact with the [Greek text].  Doubtless, a powerful
understanding, or unusual goodness of nature, will preserve a man
from such weakness, but in general the truth of my representation
will be acknowledged; pride, if not of deeper root in such families,
appears at least more upon the surface of their manners.  This
spirit of manners naturally communicates itself to their domestics
and other dependants.  Now, my landlady had been a lady's maid or a
nurse in the family of the Bishop of -, and had but lately married
away and "settled" (as such people express it) for life.  In a
little town like B-, merely to have lived in the bishop's family
conferred some distinction; and my good landlady had rather more
than her share of the pride I have noticed on that score.  What "my
lord" said and what "my lord" did, how useful he was in Parliament
and how indispensable at Oxford, formed the daily burden of her
talk.  All this I bore very well, for I was too good-natured to
laugh in anybody's face, and I could make an ample allowance for the
garrulity of an old servant.  Of necessity, however, I must have
appeared in her eyes very inadequately impressed with the bishop's
importance, and, perhaps to punish me for my indifference, or
possibly by accident, she one day repeated to me a conversation in
which I was indirectly a party concerned.  She had been to the
palace to pay her respects to the family, and, dinner being over,
was summoned into the dining-room.  In giving an account of her
household economy she happened to mention that she had let her
apartments.  Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed) had taken
occasion to caution her as to her selection of inmates, "for," said
he, "you must recollect, Betty, that this place is in the high road
to the Head; so that multitudes of Irish swindlers running away from
their debts into England, and of English swindlers running away from
their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in
their route."  This advice certainly was not without reasonable
grounds, but rather fitted to be stored up for Mrs. Betty's private
meditations than specially reported to me.  What followed, however,
was somewhat worse.  "Oh, my lord," answered my landlady (according
to her own representation of the matter), "I really don't think this
young gentleman is a swindler, because--"  "You don't THINK me a
swindler?" said I, interrupting her, in a tumult of indignation:
"for the future I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it."
And without delay I prepared for my departure.  Some concessions the
good woman seemed disposed to make; but a harsh and contemptuous
expression, which I fear that I applied to the learned dignitary
himself, roused her indignation in turn, and reconciliation then
became impossible.  I was indeed greatly irritated at the bishop's
having suggested any grounds of suspicion, however remotely, against
a person whom he had never seen; and I thought of letting him know
my mind in Greek, which, at the same time that it would furnish some
presumption that I was no swindler, would also (I hoped) compel the
bishop to reply in the same language; in which case I doubted not to
make it appear that if I was not so rich as his lordship, I was a
far better Grecian.  Calmer thoughts, however, drove this boyish
design out of my mind; for I considered that the bishop was in the
right to counsel an old servant; that he could not have designed
that his advice should be reported to me; and that the same
coarseness of mind which had led Mrs. Betty to repeat the advice at
all, might have coloured it in a way more agreeable to her own style
of thinking than to the actual expressions of the worthy bishop.

I left the lodgings the very same hour, and this turned out a very
unfortunate occurrence for me, because, living henceforward at inns,
I was drained of my money very rapidly.  In a fortnight I was
reduced to short allowance; that is, I could allow myself only one
meal a day.  From the keen appetite produced by constant exercise
and mountain air, acting on a youthful stomach, I soon began to
suffer greatly on this slender regimen, for the single meal which I
could venture to order was coffee or tea.  Even this, however, was
at length withdrawn; and afterwards, so long as I remained in Wales,
I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, &c., or on the
casual hospitalities which I now and then received in return for
such little services as I had an opportunity of rendering.
Sometimes I wrote letters of business for cottagers who happened to
have relatives in Liverpool or in London; more often I wrote love-
letters to their sweethearts for young women who had lived as
servants at Shrewsbury or other towns on the English border.  On all
such occasions I gave great satisfaction to my humble friends, and
was generally treated with hospitality; and once in particular, near
the village of Llan-y-styndw (or some such name), in a sequestered
part of Merionethshire, I was entertained for upwards of three days
by a family of young people with an affectionate and fraternal
kindness that left an impression upon my heart not yet impaired.
The family consisted at that time of four sisters and three
brothers, all grown up, and all remarkable for elegance and delicacy
of manners.  So much beauty, and so much native good breeding and
refinement, I do not remember to have seen before or since in any
cottage, except once or twice in Westmoreland and Devonshire.  They
spoke English, an accomplishment not often met with in so many
members of one family, especially in villages remote from the high
road.  Here I wrote, on my first introduction, a letter about prize-
money, for one of the brothers, who had served on board an English
man-of-war; and, more privately, two love-letters for two of the
sisters.  They were both interesting-looking girls, and one of
uncommon loveliness.  In the midst of their confusion and blushes,
whilst dictating, or rather giving me general instructions, it did
not require any great penetration to discover that what they wished
was that their letters should be as kind as was consistent with
proper maidenly pride.  I contrived so to temper my expressions as
to reconcile the gratification of both feelings; and they were as
much pleased with the way in which I had expressed their thoughts as
(in their simplicity) they were astonished at my having so readily
discovered them.  The reception one meets with from the women of a
family generally determines the tenor of one's whole entertainment.
In this case I had discharged my confidential duties as secretary so
much to the general satisfaction, perhaps also amusing them with my
conversation, that I was pressed to stay with a cordiality which I
had little inclination to resist.  I slept with the brothers, the
only unoccupied bed standing in the apartment of the young women;
but in all other points they treated me with a respect not usually
paid to purses as light as mine--as if my scholarship were
sufficient evidence that I was of "gentle blood."  Thus I lived with
them for three days and great part of a fourth; and, from the
undiminished kindness which they continued to show me, I believe I
might have stayed with them up to this time, if their power had
corresponded with their wishes.  On the last morning, however, I
perceived upon their countenances, as they sate at breakfast, the
expression of some unpleasant communication which was at hand; and
soon after, one of the brothers explained to me that their parents
had gone, the day before my arrival, to an annual meeting of
Methodists, held at Carnarvon, and were that day expected to return;
"and if they should not be so civil as they ought to be," he begged,
on the part of all the young people, that I would not take it amiss.
The parents returned with churlish faces, and "Dym Sassenach" (no
English) in answer to all my addresses.  I saw how matters stood;
and so, taking an affectionate leave of my kind and interesting
young hosts, I went my way; for, though they spoke warmly to their
parents in my behalf, and often excused the manner of the old people
by saying it was "only their way," yet I easily understood that my
talent for writing love-letters would do as little to recommend me
with two grave sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek sapphics or
alcaics; and what had been hospitality when offered to me with the
gracious courtesy of my young friends, would become charity when
connected with the harsh demeanour of these old people.  Certainly,
Mr. Shelley is right in his notions about old age:  unless
powerfully counteracted by all sorts of opposite agencies, it is a
miserable corrupter and blighter to the genial charities of the
human heart.

Soon after this I contrived, by means which I must omit for want of
room, to transfer myself to London.  And now began the latter and
fiercer stage of my long sufferings; without using a
disproportionate expression I might say, of my agony.  For I now
suffered, for upwards of sixteen weeks, the physical anguish of
hunger in.  I various degrees of intensity, but as bitter perhaps as
ever any human being can have suffered who has survived it would not
needlessly harass my reader's feelings by a detail of all that I
endured; for extremities such as these, under any circumstances of
heaviest misconduct or guilt, cannot be contemplated, even in
description, without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural
goodness of the human heart.  Let it suffice, at least on this
occasion, to say that a few fragments of bread from the breakfast-
table of one individual (who supposed me to be ill, but did not know
of my being in utter want), and these at uncertain intervals,
constituted my whole support.  During the former part of my
sufferings (that is, generally in Wales, and always for the first
two months in London) I was houseless, and very seldom slept under a
roof.   To this constant exposure to the open air I ascribe it
mainly that I did not sink under my torments.  Latterly, however,
when colder and more inclement weather came on, and when, from the
length of m sufferings, I had begun to sink into a more languishing
condition, it was no doubt fortunate for me that the same person to
whose breakfast-table I had access, allowed me to sleep in a large
unoccupied house of which he was tenant.  Unoccupied I call it, for
there was no household or establishment in it; nor any furniture,
indeed, except a table and a few chairs.  But I found, on taking
possession of my new quarters, that the house already contained one
single inmate, a poor friendless child, apparently ten years old;
but she seemed hunger-bitten, and sufferings of that sort often make
children look older than they are.  From this forlorn child I
learned that she had slept and lived there alone for some time
before I came; and great joy the poor creature expressed when she
found that I was in future to be her companion through the hours of
darkness.  The house was large, and, from the want of furniture, the
noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the spacious
staircase and hall; and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and, I
fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still
more (it appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts.  I promised
her protection against all ghosts whatsoever, but alas! I could
offer her no other assistance.  We lay upon the floor, with a bundle
of cursed law papers for a pillow, but with no other covering than a
sort of large horseman's cloak; afterwards, however, we discovered
in a garret an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some
fragments of other articles, which added a little to our warmth.
The poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for security
against her ghostly enemies.  When I was not more than usually ill I
took her into my arms, so that in general she was tolerably warm,
and often slept when I could not, for during the last two months of
my sufferings I slept much in daytime, and was apt to fall into
transient dosings at all hours.  But my sleep distressed me more
than my watching, for beside the tumultuousness of my dreams (which
were only not so awful as those which I shall have to describe
hereafter as produced by opium), my sleep was never more than what
is called DOG-SLEEP; so that I could hear myself moaning, and was
often, as it seemed to me, awakened suddenly by my own voice; and
about this time a hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as I
fell into a slumber, which has since returned upon me at different
periods of my life--viz., a sort of twitching (I know not where, but
apparently about the region of the stomach) which compelled me
violently to throw out my feet for the sake of relieving it.  This
sensation coming on as soon as I began to sleep, and the effort to
relieve it constantly awaking me, at length I slept only from
exhaustion; and from increasing weakness (as I said before) I was
constantly falling asleep and constantly awaking.  Meantime, the
master of the house sometimes came in upon us suddenly, and very
early; sometimes not till ten o'clock, sometimes not at all.  He was
in constant fear of bailiffs.  Improving on the plan of Cromwell,
every night he slept in a different quarter of London; and I
observed that he never failed to examine through a private window
the appearance of those who knocked at the door before he would
allow it to be opened.  He breaksfasted alone; indeed, his tea
equipage would hardly have admitted of his hazarding an invitation
to a second person, any more than the quantity of esculent materiel,
which for the most part was little more than a roll or a few
biscuits which he had bought on his road from the place where he had
slept.  Or, if he HAD asked a party--as I once learnedly and
facetiously observed to him--the several members of it must have
STOOD in the relation to each other (not SATE in any relation
whatever) of succession, as the metaphysicians have it, and not of a
coexistence; in the relation of the parts of time, and not of the
parts of space.  During his breakfast I generally contrived a reason
for lounging in, and, with an air of as much indifference as I could
assume, took up such fragments as he had left; sometimes, indeed,
there were none at all.  In doing this I committed no robbery except
upon the man himself, who was thus obliged (I believe) now and then
to send out at noon for an extra biscuit; for as to the poor child,
SHE was never admitted into his study (if I may give that name to
his chief depository of parchments, law writings, &c.); that room
was to her the Bluebeard room of the house, being regularly locked
on his departure to dinner, about six o'clock, which usually was his
final departure for the night.  Whether this child were an
illegitimate daughter of Mr. -, or only a servant, I could not
ascertain; she did not herself know; but certainly she was treated
altogether as a menial servant.  No sooner did Mr.--make his
appearance than she went below stairs, brushed his shoes, coat, &c.;
and, except when she was summoned to run an errand, she never
emerged from the dismal Tartarus of the kitchen, &c., to the upper
air until my welcome knock at night called up her little trembling
footsteps to the front door.  Of her life during the daytime,
however, I knew little but what I gathered from her own account at
night, for as soon as the hours of business commenced I saw that my
absence would be acceptable, and in general, therefore, I went off
and sate in the parks or elsewhere until nightfall.

But who and what, meantime, was the master of the house himself?
Reader, he was one of those anomalous practitioners in lower
departments of the law who--what shall I say?--who on prudential
reasons, or from necessity, deny themselves all indulgence in the
luxury of too delicate a conscience, (a periphrasis which might be
abridged considerably, but THAT I leave to the reader's taste):  in
many walks of life a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than
a wife or a carriage; and just as people talk of "laying down" their
carriages, so I suppose my friend Mr.--had "laid down" his
conscience for a time, meaning, doubtless, to resume it as soon as
he could afford it.  The inner economy of such a man's daily life
would present a most strange picture, if I could allow myself to
amuse the reader at his expense.  Even with my limited opportunities
for observing what went on, I saw many scenes of London intrigues
and complex chicanery, "cycle and epicycle, orb in orb," at which I
sometimes smile to this day, and at which I smiled then, in spite of
my misery.  My situation, however, at that time gave me little
experience in my own person of any qualities in Mr. -'s character
but such as did him honour; and of his whole strange composition I
must forget everything but that towards me he was obliging, and to
the extent of his power, generous.

That power was not, indeed, very extensive; however, in common with
the rats, I sate rent free; and as Dr. Johnson has recorded that he
never but once in his life had as much wall-fruit as he could eat,
so let me be grateful that on that single occasion I had as large a
choice of apartments in a London mansion as I could possibly desire.
Except the Bluebeard room, which the poor child believed to be
haunted, all others, from the attics to the cellars, were at our
service; "the world was all before us," and we pitched our tent for
the night in any spot we chose.  This house I have already described
as a large one; it stands in a conspicuous situation and in a well-
known part of London.  Many of my readers will have passed it, I
doubt not, within a few hours of reading this.  For myself, I never
fail to visit it when business draws me to London; about ten o'clock
this very night, August 15, 1821--being my birthday--I turned aside
from my evening walk down Oxford Street, purposely to take a glance
at it; it is now occupied by a respectable family, and by the lights
in the front drawing-room I observed a domestic party assembled,
perhaps at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay.  Marvellous
contrast, in my eyes, to the darkness, cold, silence, and desolation
of that same house eighteen years ago, when its nightly occupants
were one famishing scholar and a neglected child.  Her, by-the-bye,
in after-years I vainly endeavoured to trace.  Apart from her
situation, she was not what would be called an interesting child;
she was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably
pleasing in manners.  But, thank God! even in those years I needed
not the embellishments of novel accessories to conciliate my
affections:  plain human nature, in its humblest and most homely
apparel, was enough for me, and I loved the child because she was my
partner in wretchedness.  If she is now living she is probably a
mother, with children of her own; but, as I have said, I could never
trace her.

This I regret; but another person there was at that time whom I have
since sought to trace with far deeper earnestness, and with far
deeper sorrow at my failure.  This person was a young woman, and one
of that unhappy class who subsist upon the wages of prostitution.  I
feel no shame, nor have any reason to feel it, in avowing that I was
then on familiar and friendly terms with many women in that
unfortunate condition.  The reader needs neither smile at this
avowal nor frown; for, not to remind my classical readers of the old
Latin proverb, "Sine cerere," &c., it may well be supposed that in
the existing state of my purse my connection with such women could
not have been an impure one.  But the truth is, that at no time of
my life have I been a person to hold myself polluted by the touch or
approach of any creature that wore a human shape; on the contrary,
from my very earliest youth it has been my pride to converse
familiarly, MORE SOCRATIO, with all human beings, man, woman, and
child, that chance might fling in my way; a practice which is
friendly to the knowledge of human nature, to good feelings, and to
that frankness of address which becomes a man who would be thought a
philosopher.  For a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the
poor limitary creature calling himself a man of the world, and
filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and
education, but should look upon himself as a catholic creature, and
as standing in equal relation to high and low, to educated and
uneducated, to the guilty and the innocent.  Being myself at that
time of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I
naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who
are technically called street-walkers.  Many of these women had
occasionally taken my part against watchmen who wished to drive me
off the steps of houses where I was sitting.  But one amongst them,
the one on whose account I have at all introduced this subject--yet
no! let me not class the, oh! noble-minded Ann--with that order of
women.  Let me find, if it be possible, some gentler name to
designate the condition of her to whose bounty and compassion,
ministering to my necessities when all the world had forsaken me, I
owe it that I am at this time alive.  For many weeks I had walked at
nights with this poor friendless girl up and down Oxford Street, or
had rested with her on steps and under the shelter of porticoes.
She could not be so old as myself; she told me, indeed, that she had
not completed her sixteenth year.  By such questions as my interest
about her prompted I had gradually drawn forth her simple history.
Hers was a case of ordinary occurrence (as I have since had reason
to think), and one in which, if London beneficence had better
adapted its arrangements to meet it, the power of the law might
oftener be interposed to protect and to avenge.  But the stream of
London charity flows in a channel which, though deep and mighty, is
yet noiseless and underground; not obvious or readily accessible to
poor houseless wanderers; and it cannot be denied that the outside
air and framework of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive.
In any case, however, I saw that part of her injuries might easily
have been redressed, and I urged her often and earnestly to lay her
complaint before a magistrate.  Friendless as she was, I assured her
that she would meet with immediate attention, and that English
justice, which was no respecter of persons, would speedily and amply
avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had plundered her little
property.  She promised me often that she would, but she delayed
taking the steps I pointed out from time to time, for she was timid
and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow had taken
hold of her young heart; and perhaps she thought justly that the
most upright judge and the most righteous tribunals could do nothing
to repair her heaviest wrongs.  Something, however, would perhaps
have been done, for it had been settled between us at length, but
unhappily on the very last time but one that I was ever to see her,
that in a day or two we should go together before a magistrate, and
that I should speak on her behalf.  This little service it was
destined, however, that I should never realise.  Meantime, that
which she rendered to me, and which was greater than I could ever
have repaid her, was this:- One night, when we were pacing slowly
along Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt more than
usually ill and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho
Square.  Thither we went, and we sat down on the steps of a house,
which to this hour I never pass without a pang of grief and an inner
act of homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the
noble action which she there performed.  Suddenly, as we sate, I
grew much worse.  I had been leaning my head against her bosom, and
all at once I sank from her arms and fell backwards on the steps.
From the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of the
liveliest kind, that without some powerful and reviving stimulus I
should either have died on the spot, or should at least have sunk to
a point of exhaustion from which all reascent under my friendless
circumstances would soon have become hopeless.  Then it was, at this
crisis of my fate, that my poor orphan companion, who had herself
met with little but injuries in this world, stretched out a saving
hand to me.  Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment's delay,
she ran off into Oxford Street, and in less time than could be
imagined returned to me with a glass of port wine and spices, that
acted upon my empty stomach, which at that time would have rejected
all solid food, with an instantaneous power of restoration; and for
this glass the generous girl without a murmur paid out of her humble
purse at a time--be it remembered!--when she had scarcely
wherewithal to purchase the bare necessaries of life, and when she
could have no reason to expect that I should ever be able to
reimburse her.

Oh, youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing
in solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of heart and
perfect love--how often have I wished that, as in ancient times, the
curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to
pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment; even so
the benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a
like prerogative, might have power given to it from above to chase,
to haunt, to waylay, to overtake, to pursue thee into the central
darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were possible) into the
darkness of the grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic
message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation!

I do not often weep:  for not only do my thoughts on subjects
connected with the chief interests of man daily, nay hourly, descend
a thousand fathoms "too deep for tears;" not only does the sternness
of my habits of thought present an antagonism to the feelings which
prompt tears--wanting of necessity to those who, being protected
usually by their levity from any tendency to meditative sorrow,
would by that same levity be made incapable of resisting it on any
casual access of such feelings; but also, I believe that all minds
which have contemplated such objects as deeply as I have done, must,
for their own protection from utter despondency, have early
encouraged and cherished some tranquillising belief as to the future
balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings.  On
these accounts I am cheerful to this hour, and, as I have said, I do
not often weep.  Yet some feelings, though not deeper or more
passionate, are more tender than others; and often, when I walk at
this time in Oxford Street by dreamy lamplight, and hear those airs
played on a barrel-organ which years ago solaced me and my dear
companion (as I must always call her), I shed tears, and muse with
myself at the mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and so
critically separated us for ever.  How it happened the reader will
understand from what remains of this introductory narration.

Soon after the period of the last incident I have recorded I met in
Albemarle Street a gentleman of his late Majesty's household.  This
gentleman had received hospitalities on different occasions from my
family, and he challenged me upon the strength of my family
likeness.  I did not attempt any disguise; I answered his questions
ingenuously, and, on his pledging his word of honour that he would
not betray me to my guardians, I gave him an address to my friend
the attorney's.  The next day I received from him a 10 pound bank-
note.  The letter enclosing it was delivered with other letters of
business to the attorney, but though his look and manner informed me
that he suspected its contents, he gave it up to me honourably and
without demur.

This present, from the particular service to which it was applied,
leads me naturally to speak of the purpose which had allured me up
to London, and which I had been (to use a forensic word) soliciting
from the first day of my arrival in London to that of my final
departure.

In so mighty a world as London it will surprise my readers that I
should not have found some means of starving off the last
extremities, of penury; and it will strike them that two resources
at least must have been open to me--viz., either to seek assistance
from the friends of my family, or to turn my youthful talents and
attainments into some channel of pecuniary emolument.  As to the
first course, I may observe generally, that what I dreaded beyond
all other evils was the chance of being reclaimed by my guardians;
not doubting that whatever power the law gave them would have been
enforced against me to the utmost--that is, to the extremity of
forcibly restoring me to the school which I had quitted, a
restoration which, as it would in my eyes have been a dishonour,
even if submitted to voluntarily, could not fail, when extorted from
me in contempt and defiance of my own wishes and efforts, to have
been a humiliation worse to me than death, and which would indeed
have terminated in death.  I was therefore shy enough of applying
for assistance even in those quarters where I was sure of receiving
it, at the risk of furnishing my guardians with any clue of
recovering me.  But as to London in particular, though doubtless my
father had in his lifetime had many friends there, yet (as ten years
had passed since his death) I remembered few of them even by name;
and never having seen London before, except once for a few hours, I
knew not the address of even those few.  To this mode of gaining
help, therefore, in part the difficulty, but much more the paramount
fear which I have mentioned, habitually indisposed me.  In regard to
the other mode, I now feel half inclined to join my reader in
wondering that I should have overlooked it.  As a corrector of Greek
proofs (if in no other way) I might doubtless have gained enough for
my slender wants.  Such an office as this I could have discharged
with an exemplary and punctual accuracy that would soon have gained
me the confidence of my employers.  But it must not be forgotten
that, even for such an office as this, it was necessary that I
should first of all have an introduction to some respectable
publisher, and this I had no means of obtaining.  To say the truth,
however, it had never once occurred to me to think of literary
labours as a source of profit.  No mode sufficiently speedy of
obtaining money had ever occurred to me but that of borrowing it on
the strength of my future claims and expectations.  This mode I
sought by every avenue to compass; and amongst other persons I
applied to a Jew named D- {4}

To this Jew, and to other advertising money-lenders (some of whom
were, I believe, also Jews), I had introduced myself with an account
of my expectations; which account, on examining my father's will at
Doctors' Commons, they had ascertained to be correct.  The person
there mentioned as the second son of--was found to have all the
claims (or more than all) that I had stated; but one question still
remained, which the faces of the Jews pretty significantly
suggested--was I that person?  This doubt had never occurred to me
as a possible one; I had rather feared, whenever my Jewish friends
scrutinised me keenly, that I might be too well known to be that
person, and that some scheme might be passing in their minds for
entrapping me and selling me to my guardians.  It was strange to me
to find my own self materialiter considered (so I expressed it, for
I doated on logical accuracy of distinctions), accused, or at least
suspected, of counterfeiting my own self formaliter considered.
However, to satisfy their scruples, I took the only course in my
power.  Whilst I was in Wales I had received various letters from
young friends these I produced, for I carried them constantly in my
pocket, being, indeed, by this time almost the only relics of my
personal encumbrances (excepting the clothes I wore) which I had not
in one way or other disposed of.  Most of these letters were from
the Earl of -, who was at that time my chief (or rather only)
confidential friend.  These letters were dated from Eton.  I had
also some from the Marquis of -, his father, who, though absorbed in
agricultural pursuits, yet having been an Etonian himself, and as
good a scholar as a nobleman needs to be, still retained an
affection for classical studies and for youthful scholars.  He had
accordingly, from the time that I was fifteen, corresponded with me;
sometimes upon the great improvements which he had made or was
meditating in the counties of M- and Sl- since I had been there,
sometimes upon the merits of a Latin poet, and at other times
suggesting subjects to me on which he wished me to write verses.

On reading the letters, one of my Jewish friends agreed to furnish
me with two or three hundred pounds on my personal security,
provided I could persuade the young Earl--who was, by the way, not
older than myself--to guarantee the payment on our coming of age;
the Jew's final object being, as I now suppose, not the trifling
profit he could expect to make by me, but the prospect of
establishing a connection with my noble friend, whose immense
expectations were well known to him.  In pursuance of this proposal
on the part of the Jew, about eight or nine days after I had
received the 10 pounds, I prepared to go down to Eton.  Nearly 3
pounds of the money I had given to my money-lending friend, on his
alleging that the stamps must be bought, in order that the writings
might be preparing whilst I was away from London.  I thought in my
heart that he was lying; but I did not wish to give him any excuse
for charging his own delays upon me.  A smaller sum I had given to
my friend the attorney (who was connected with the money-lenders as
their lawyer), to which, indeed, he was entitled for his unfurnished
lodgings.  About fifteen shillings I had employed in re-establishing
(though in a very humble way) my dress.  Of the remainder I gave one
quarter to Ann, meaning on my return to have divided with her
whatever might remain.  These arrangements made, soon after six
o'clock on a dark winter evening I set off, accompanied by Ann,
towards Piccadilly; for it was my intention to go down as far as
Salthill on the Bath or Bristol mail.  Our course lay through a part
of the town which has now all disappeared, so that I can no longer
retrace its ancient boundaries--Swallow Street, I think it was
called.  Having time enough before us, however, we bore away to the
left until we came into Golden Square; there, near the corner of
Sherrard Street, we sat down, not wishing to part in the tumult and
blaze of Piccadilly.  I had told her of my plans some time before,
and I now assured her again that she should share in my good
fortune, if I met with any, and that I would never forsake her as
soon as I had power to protect her.  This I fully intended, as much
from inclination as from a sense of duty; for setting aside
gratitude, which in any case must have made me her debtor for life,
I loved her as affectionately as if she had been my sister; and at
this moment with sevenfold tenderness, from pity at witnessing her
extreme dejection.  I had apparently most reason for dejection,
because I was leaving the saviour of my life; yet I, considering the
shock my health had received, was cheerful and full of hope.  She,
on the contrary, who was parting with one who had had little means
of serving her, except by kindness and brotherly treatment, was
overcome by sorrow; so that, when I kissed her at our final
farewell, she put her arms about my neck and wept without speaking a
word.  I hoped to return in a week at farthest, and I agreed with
her that on the fifth night from that, and every night afterwards,
she would wait for me at six o'clock near the bottom of Great
Titchfield Street, which had been our customary haven, as it were,
of rendezvous, to prevent our missing each other in the great
Mediterranean of Oxford Street.  This and other measures of
precaution I took; one only I forgot.  She had either never told me,
or (as a matter of no great interest) I had forgotten her surname.
It is a general practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank in her
unhappy condition, not (as novel-reading women of higher
pretensions) to style themselves Miss Douglas, Miss Montague, &c.,
but simply by their Christian names--Mary, Jane, Frances, &c.  Her
surname, as the surest means of tracing her hereafter, I ought now
to have inquired; but the truth is, having no reason to think that
our meeting could, in consequence of a short interruption, be more
difficult or uncertain than it had been for so many weeks, I had
scarcely for a moment adverted to it as necessary, or placed it
amongst my memoranda against this parting interview; and my final
anxieties being spent in comforting her with hopes, and in pressing
upon her the necessity of getting some medicines for a violent cough
and hoarseness with which she was troubled, I wholly forgot it until
it was too late to recall her.

It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester Coffee-
house, and the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I
mounted on the outside.  The fine fluent motion {5} of this mail
soon laid me asleep:  it is somewhat remarkable that the first easy
or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months, was on the
outside of a mail-coach--a bed which at this day I find rather an
uneasy one.  Connected with this sleep was a little incident which
served, as hundreds of others did at that time, to convince me how
easily a man who has never been in any great distress may pass
through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything
of the possible goodness of the human heart--or, as I must add with
a sigh, of its possible vileness.  So thick a curtain of MANNERS is
drawn over the features and expression of men's NATURES, that to the
ordinary observer the two extremities, and the infinite field of
varieties which lie between them, are all confounded; the vast and
multitudinous compass of their several harmonies reduced to the
meagre outline of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of
elementary sounds.  The case was this:  for the first four or five
miles from London I annoyed my fellow-passenger on the roof by
occasionally falling against him when the coach gave a lurch to his:
side; and indeed, if the road had been less smooth and level than it
is, I should have fallen off from weakness.  Of this annoyance he
complained heavily, as perhaps, in the same circumstances, most
people would; he expressed his complaint, however, more morosely
than the occasion seemed to warrant, and if I had parted with him at
that moment I should have thought of him (if I had considered it
worth while to think of him at all) as a surly and almost brutal
fellow.  However, I was conscious that I had given him some cause
for complaint, and therefore I apologized to him, and assured him I
would do what I could to avoid falling asleep for the future; and at
the same time, in as few words as possible, I explained to him that
I was ill and in a weak state from long suffering, and that I could
not afford at that time to take an inside place.  This man's manner
changed, upon hearing this explanation, in an instant; and when I
next woke for a minute from the noise and lights of Hounslow (for in
spite of my wishes and efforts I had fallen asleep again within two
minutes from the time I had spoken to him) I found that he had put
his arm round me to protect me from falling off, and for the rest of
my journey he behaved to me with the gentleness of a woman, so that
at length I almost lay in his arms; and this was the more kind, as
he could not have known that I was not going the whole way to Bath
or Bristol.  Unfortunately, indeed, I DID go rather farther than I
intended, for so genial and so refreshing was my sleep, that the
next time after leaving Hounslow that I fully awoke was upon the
sudden pulling up of the mail (possibly at a post-office), and on
inquiry I found that we had reached Maidenhead--six or seven miles,
I think, ahead of Salthill.  Here I alighted, and for the half-
minute that the mail stopped I was entreated by my friendly
companion (who, from the transient glimpse I had had of him in
Piccadilly, seemed to me to be a gentleman's butler, or person of
that rank) to go to bed without delay.  This I promised, though with
no intention of doing so; and in fact I immediately set forward, or
rather backward, on foot.  It must then have been nearly midnight,
but so slowly did I creep along that I heard a clock in a cottage
strike four before I turned down the lane from Slough to Eton.  The
air and the sleep had both refreshed me; but I was weary
nevertheless.  I remember a thought (obvious enough, and which has
been prettily expressed by a Roman poet) which gave me some
consolation at that moment under my poverty.  There had been some
time before a murder committed on or near Hounslow Heath.  I think I
cannot be mistaken when I say that the name of the murdered person
was STEELE, and that he was the owner of a lavender plantation in
that neighbourhood.  Every step of my progress was bringing me
nearer to the Heath, and it naturally occurred to me that I and the
accused murderer, if he were that night abroad, might at every
instant be unconsciously approaching each other through the
darkness; in which case, said I--supposing I, instead of being (as
indeed I am) little better than an outcast -


Lord of my learning, and no land beside -


were, like my friend Lord -, heir by general repute to 70,000 pounds
per annum, what a panic should I be under at this moment about my
throat!  Indeed, it was not likely that Lord--should ever be in my
situation.  But nevertheless, the spirit of the remark remains true-
-that vast power and possessions make a man shamefully afraid of
dying; and I am convinced that many of the most intrepid
adventurers, who, by fortunately being poor, enjoy the full use of
their natural courage, would, if at the very instant of going into
action news were brought to them that they had unexpectedly
succeeded to an estate in England of 50,000 pounds a-year, feel
their dislike to bullets considerably sharpened, {6} and their
efforts at perfect equanimity and self-possession proportionably
difficult.  So true it is, in the language of a wise man whose own
experience had made him acquainted with both fortunes, that riches
are better fitted


To slacken virtue, and abate her edge,
Than tempt her to do ought may merit praise.
Paradise Regained.


I dally with my subject because, to myself, the remembrance of these
times is profoundly interesting.  But my reader shall not have any
further cause to complain, for I now hasten to its close.  In the
road between Slough and Eton I fell asleep, and just as the morning
began to dawn I was awakened by the voice of a man standing over me
and surveying me.  I know not what he was:  he was an ill-looking
fellow, but not therefore of necessity an ill-meaning fellow; or, if
he were, I suppose he thought that no person sleeping out-of-doors
in winter could be worth robbing.  In which conclusion, however, as
it regarded myself, I beg to assure him, if he should be among my
readers, that he was mistaken.  After a slight remark he passed on;
and I was not sorry at his disturbance, as it enabled me to pass
through Eton before people were generally up.  The night had been
heavy and lowering, but towards the morning it had changed to a
slight frost, and the ground and the trees were now covered with
rime.  I slipped through Eton unobserved; washed myself, and as far
as possible adjusted my dress, at a little public-house in Windsor;
and about eight o'clock went down towards Pote's.  On my road I met
some junior boys, of whom I made inquiries.  An Etonian is always a
gentleman; and, in spite of my shabby habiliments, they answered me
civilly.  My friend Lord--was gone to the University of  -.  "Ibi
omnis effusus labor!"  I had, however, other friends at Eton; but it
is not to all that wear that name in prosperity that a man is
willing to present himself in distress.  On recollecting myself,
however, I asked for the Earl of D-, to whom (though my acquaintance
with him was not so intimate as with some others) I should not have
shrunk from presenting myself under any circumstances.  He was still
at Eton, though I believe on the wing for Cambridge.  I called, was
received kindly, and asked to breakfast.

Here let me stop for a moment to check my reader from any erroneous
conclusions.  Because I have had occasion incidentally to speak of
various patrician friends, it must not be supposed that I have
myself any pretension to rank and high blood.  I thank God that I
have not.  I am the son of a plain English merchant, esteemed during
his life for his great integrity, and strongly attached to literary
pursuits (indeed, he was himself, anonymously, an author).  If he
had lived it was expected that he would have been very rich; but
dying prematurely, he left no more than about 30,000 pounds amongst
seven different claimants.  My mother I may mention with honour, as
still more highly gifted; for though unpretending to the name and
honours of a LITERARY woman, I shall presume to call her (what many
literary women are not) an INTELLECTUAL woman; and I believe that if
ever her letters should be collected and published, they would be
thought generally to exhibit as much strong and masculine sense,
delivered in as pure "mother English," racy and fresh with idiomatic
graces, as any in our language--hardly excepting those of Lady M. W.
Montague.  These are my honours of descent, I have no other; and I
have thanked God sincerely that I have not, because, in my judgment,
a station which raises a man too eminently above the level of his
fellow-creatures is not the most favourable to moral or to
intellectual qualities.

Lord D- placed before me a most magnificent breakfast.  It was
really so; but in my eyes it seemed trebly magnificent, from being
the first regular meal, the first "good man's table," that I had
sate down to for months.  Strange to say, however, I could scarce
eat anything.  On the day when I first received my 10 pound bank-
note I had gone to a baker's shop and bought a couple of rolls; this
very shop I had two months or six weeks before surveyed with an
eagerness of desire which it was almost humiliating to me to
recollect.  I remembered the story about Otway, and feared that
there might be danger in eating too rapidly.  But I had no need for
alarm; my appetite was quite sunk, and I became sick before I had
eaten half of what I had bought.  This effect from eating what
approached to a meal I continued to feel for weeks; or, when I did
not experience any nausea, part of what I ate was rejected,
sometimes with acidity, sometimes immediately and without any
acidity.  On the present occasion, at Lord D-'s table, I found
myself not at all better than usual, and in the midst of luxuries I
had no appetite.  I had, however, unfortunately, at all times a
craving for wine; I explained my situation, therefore, to Lord D-,
and gave him a short account of my late sufferings, at which he
expressed great compassion, and called for wine.  This gave me a
momentary relief and pleasure; and on all occasions when I had an
opportunity I never failed to drink wine, which I worshipped then as
I have since worshipped opium.  I am convinced, however, that this
indulgence in wine contributed to strengthen my malady, for the tone
of my stomach was apparently quite sunk, and by a better regimen it
might sooner, and perhaps effectually, have been revived.  I hope
that it was not from this love of wine that I lingered in the
neighbourhood of my Eton friends; I persuaded myself then that it
was from reluctance to ask of Lord D-, on whom I was conscious I had
not sufficient claims, the particular service in quest of which I
had come down to Eton.  I was, however unwilling to lose my journey,
and--I asked it.  Lord D-, whose good nature was unbounded, and
which, in regard to myself, had been measured rather by his
compassion perhaps for my condition, and his knowledge of my
intimacy with some of his relatives, than by an over-rigorous
inquiry into the extent of my own direct claims, faltered,
nevertheless, at this request.  He acknowledged that he did not like
to have any dealings with money-lenders, and feared lest such a
transaction might come to the ears of his connexions.  Moreover, he
doubted whether HIS signature, whose expectations were so much more
bounded than those of -, would avail with my unchristian friends.
However, he did not wish, as it seemed, to mortify me by an absolute
refusal; for after a little consideration he promised, under certain
conditions which he pointed out, to give his security.  Lord D- was
at this time not eighteen years of age; but I have often doubted, on
recollecting since the good sense and prudence which on this
occasion he mingled with so much urbanity of manner (an urbanity
which in him wore the grace of youthful sincerity), whether any
statesman--the oldest and the most accomplished in diplomacy--could
have acquitted himself better under the same circumstances.  Most
people, indeed, cannot be addressed on such a business without
surveying you with looks as austere and unpropitious as those of a
Saracen's head.

Recomforted by this promise, which was not quite equal to the best
but far above the worst that I had pictured to myself as possible, I
returned in a Windsor coach to London three days after I had quitted
it.  And now I come to the end of my story.  The Jews did not
approve of Lord D-'s terms; whether they would in the end have
acceded to them, and were only seeking time for making due
inquiries, I know not; but many delays were made, time passed on,
the small fragment of my bank-note had just melted away, and before
any conclusion could have been put to the business I must have
relapsed into my former state of wretchedness.  Suddenly, however,
at this crisis, an opening was made, almost by accident, for
reconciliation with my friends; I quitted London in haste for a
remote part of England; after some time I proceeded to the
university, and it was not until many months had passed away that I
had it in my power again to revisit the ground which had become so
interesting to me, and to this day remains so, as the chief scene of
my youthful sufferings.

Meantime, what had become of poor Ann?  For her I have reserved my
concluding words.  According to our agreement, I sought her daily,
and waited for her every night, so long as I stayed in London, at
the corner of Titchfield Street.  I inquired for her of every one
who was likely to know her, and during the last hours of my stay in
London I put into activity every means of tracing her that my
knowledge of London suggested and the limited extent of my power
made possible.  The street where she had lodged I knew, but not the
house; and I remembered at last some account which she had given me
of ill-treatment from her landlord, which made it probable that she
had quitted those lodgings before we parted.  She had few
acquaintances; most people, besides, thought that the earnestness of
my inquiries arose from motives which moved their laughter or their
slight regard; and others, thinking I was in chase of a girl who had
robbed me of some trifles, were naturally and excusably indisposed
to give me any clue to her, if indeed they had any to give.  Finally
as my despairing resource, on the day I left London I put into the
hands of the only person who (I was sure) must know Ann by sight,
from having been in company with us once or twice, an address to -,
in -shire, at that time the residence of my family.  But to this
hour I have never heard a syllable about her.  This, amongst such
troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest
affliction.  If she lived, doubtless we must have been some time in
search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty
labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other--
a barrier no wider than a London street often amounting in the end
to a separation for eternity!  During some years I hoped that she
DID live; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of
the word MYRIAD, I may say that on my different visits to London I
have looked into many, many myriads of female faces, in the hope of
meeting her.  I should know her again amongst a thousand, if I saw
her for a moment; for though not handsome, she had a sweet
expression of countenance and a peculiar and graceful carriage of
the head.  I sought her, I have said, in hope.  So it was for years;
but now I should fear to see her; and her cough, which grieved me
when I parted with her, is now my consolation.  I now wish to see
her no longer; but think of her, more gladly, as one long since laid
in the grave--in the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen; taken away,
before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her
ingenuous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians had completed the
ruin they had begun.

[The remainder of this very interesting article will be given in the
next number.--ED.]




PART II




From the London Magazine for October 1821.

So then, Oxford Street, stony-hearted step-mother! thou that
listenest to the sighs of orphans and drinkest the tears of
children, at length I was dismissed from thee; the time was come at
last that I no more should pace in anguish thy never-ending
terraces, no more should dream and wake in captivity to the pangs of
hunger.  Successors too many, to myself and Ann, have doubtless
since then trodden in our footsteps, inheritors of our calamities;
other orphans than Ann have sighed; tears have been shed by other
children; and thou, Oxford Street, hast since doubtless echoed to
the groans of innumerable hearts.  For myself, however, the storm
which I had outlived seemed to have been the pledge of a long fair-
weather--the premature sufferings which I had paid down to have been
accepted as a ransom for many years to come, as a price of long
immunity from sorrow; and if again I walked in London a solitary and
contemplative man (as oftentimes I did), I walked for the most part
in serenity and peace of mind.  And although it is true that the
calamities of my noviciate in London had struck root so deeply in my
bodily constitution, that afterwards they shot up and flourished
afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has overshadowed and
darkened my latter years, yet these second assaults of suffering
were met with a fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of a
maturer intellect, and with alleviations from sympathising
affection--how deep and tender!

Thus, however, with whatsoever alleviations, years that were far
asunder were bound together by subtle links of suffering derived
from a common root.  And herein I notice an instance of the short-
sightedness of human desires, that oftentimes on moonlight nights,
during my first mournful abode in London, my consolation was (if
such it could be thought) to gaze from Oxford Street up every avenue
in succession which pierces through the heart of Marylebone to the
fields and the woods; for THAT, said I, travelling with my eyes up
the long vistas which lay part in light and part in shade, "THAT is
the road to the North, and therefore to, and if I had the wings of a
dove, THAT way I would fly for comfort."  Thus I said, and thus I
wished, in my blindness.  Yet even in that very northern region it
was, even in that very valley, nay, in that very house to which my
erroneous wishes pointed, that this second birth of my sufferings
began, and that they again threatened to besiege the citadel of life
and hope.  There it was that for years I was persecuted by visions
as ugly, and as ghastly phantoms as ever haunted the couch of an
Orestes; and in this unhappier than he, that sleep, which comes to
all as a respite and a restoration, and to him especially as a
blessed {7} balm for his wounded heart and his haunted brain,
visited me as my bitterest scourge.  Thus blind was I in my desires;
yet if a veil interposes between the dim-sightedness of man and his
future calamities, the same veil hides from him their alleviations,
and a grief which had not been feared is met by consolations which
had not been hoped.  I therefore, who participated, as it were, in
the troubles of Orestes (excepting only in his agitated conscience),
participated no less in all his supports.  My Eumenides, like his,
were at my bed-feet, and stared in upon me through the curtains; but
watching by my pillow, or defrauding herself of sleep to bear me
company through the heavy watches of the night, sate my Electra; for
thou, beloved M., dear companion of my later years, thou wast my
Electra! and neither in nobility of mind nor in long-suffering
affection wouldst permit that a Grecian sister should excel an
English wife.  For thou thoughtest not much to stoop to humble
offices of kindness and to servile {8} ministrations of tenderest
affection--to wipe away for years the unwholesome dews upon the
forehead, or to refresh the lips when parched and baked with fever;
nor even when thy own peaceful slumbers had by long sympathy become
infected with the spectacle of my dread contest with phantoms and
shadowy enemies that oftentimes bade me "sleep no more!"--not even
then didst thou utter a complaint or any murmur, nor withdraw thy
angelic smiles, nor shrink from thy service of love, more than
Electra did of old.  For she too, though she was a Grecian woman,
and the daughter of the king {9} of men, yet wept sometimes, and hid
her face {10} in her robe.

But these troubles are past; and thou wilt read records of a period
so dolorous to us both as the legend of some hideous dream that can
return no more.  Meantime, I am again in London, and again I pace
the terraces of Oxford Street by night; and oftentimes, when I am
oppressed by anxieties that demand all my philosophy and the comfort
of thy presence to support, and yet remember that I am separated
from thee by three hundred miles and the length of three dreary
months, I look up the streets that run northwards from Oxford
Street, upon moon-light nights, and recollect my youthful
ejaculation of anguish; and remembering that thou art sitting alone
in that same valley, and mistress of that very house to which my
heart turned in its blindness nineteen years ago, I think that,
though blind indeed, and scattered to the winds of late, the
promptings of my heart may yet have had reference to a remoter time,
and may be justified if read in another meaning; and if I could
allow myself to descend again to the impotent wishes of childhood, I
should again say to myself, as I look to the North, "Oh, that I had
the wings of a dove--" and with how just a confidence in thy good
and gracious nature might I add the other half of my early
ejaculation--"And THAT way I would fly for comfort!"


THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM


It is so long since I first took opium that if it had been a
trifling incident in my life I might have forgotten its date; but
cardinal events are not to be forgotten, and from circumstances
connected with it I remember that it must be referred to the autumn
of 1804.  During that season I was in London, having come thither
for the first time since my entrance at college.  And my
introduction to opium arose in the following way.  From an early age
I had been accustomed to wash my head in cold water at least once a
day:  being suddenly seized with toothache, I attributed it to some
relaxation caused by an accidental intermission of that practice,
jumped out of bed, plunged my head into a basin of cold water, and
with hair thus wetted went to sleep.  The next morning, as I need
hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head
and face, from which I had hardly any respite for about twenty days.
On the twenty-first day I think it was, and on a Sunday, that I went
out into the streets, rather to run away, if possible, from my
torments, than with any distinct purpose.  By accident I met a
college acquaintance, who recommended opium.  Opium! dread agent of
unimaginable pleasure and pain!  I had heard of it as I had of manna
or of ambrosia, but no further.  How unmeaning a sound was it at
that time:  what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart!
what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances!
Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance attached
to the minutest circumstances connected with the place and the time
and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me the Paradise
of Opium-eaters.  It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless:  and
a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy
Sunday in London.  My road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and
near "the stately Pantheon" (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly called
it) I saw a druggist's shop.  The druggist--unconscious minister of
celestial pleasures!--as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday,
looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be
expected to look on a Sunday; and when I asked for the tincture of
opium, he gave it to me as any other man might do, and furthermore,
out of my shilling returned me what seemed to be real copper
halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer.  Nevertheless, in
spite of such indications of humanity, he has ever since existed in
my mind as the beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to
earth on a special mission to myself.  And it confirms me in this
way of considering him, that when I next came up to London I sought
him near the stately Pantheon, and found him not; and thus to me,
who knew not his name (if indeed he had one), he seemed rather to
have vanished from Oxford Street than to have removed in any bodily
fashion.  The reader may choose to think of him as possibly no more
than a sublunary druggist; it may be so, but my faith is better--I
believe him to have evanesced, {11} or evaporated.  So unwillingly
would I connect any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place,
and creature, that first brought me acquainted with the celestial
drug.

Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment
in taking the quantity prescribed.  I was necessarily ignorant of
the whole art and mystery of opium-taking, and what I took I took
under every disadvantage.  But I took it--and in an hour--oh,
heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest
depths, of inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me!
That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes:  this
negative effect wasswallowed up in the immensity of those positive
effects which had opened before me--in the abyss of divine enjoyment
thus suddenly revealed.  Here was a panacea, a [Greek text] for all
human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which
philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered:
happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the
waistcoat pocket; portable ecstacies might be had corked up in a
pint bottle, and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the
mail-coach.  But if I talk in this way the reader will think I am
laughing, and I can assure him that nobody will laugh long who deals
much with opium:  its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn
complexion, and in his happiest state the opium-eater cannot present
himself in the character of L'Allegro:  even then he speaks and
thinks as becomes Il Penseroso.  Nevertheless, I have a very
reprehensible way of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery;
and unless when I am checked by some more powerful feelings, I am
afraid I shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in these
annals of suffering or enjoyment.  The reader must allow a little to
my infirm nature in this respect; and with a few indulgences of that
sort I shall endeavour to be as grave, if not drowsy, as fits a
theme like opium, so anti-mercurial as it really is, and so drowsy
as it is falsely reputed.

And first, one word with respect to its bodily effects; for upon all
that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium, whether by
travellers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege of lying as an
old immemorial right), or by professors of medicine, writing ex
cathedra, I have but one emphatic criticism to pronounce--Lies!
lies! lies!  I remember once, in passing a book-stall, to have
caught these words from a page of some satiric author:  "By this
time I became convinced that the London newspapers spoke truth at
least twice a week, viz., on Tuesday and Saturday, and might safely
be depended upon for--the list of bankrupts."  In like manner, I do
by no means deny that some truths have been delivered to the world
in regard to opium.  Thus it has been repeatedly affirmed by the
learned that opium is a dusky brown in colour; and this, take
notice, I grant.  Secondly, that it is rather dear, which also I
grant, for in my time East Indian opium has been three guineas a
pound, and Turkey eight.  And thirdly, that if you eat a good deal
of it, most probably you must--do what is particularly disagreeable
to any man of regular habits, viz., die. {12}  These weighty
propositions are, all and singular, true:  I cannot gainsay them,
and truth ever was, and will be, commendable.  But in these three
theorems I believe we have exhausted the stock of knowledge as yet
accumulated by men on the subject of opium.

And therefore, worthy doctors, as there seems to be room for further
discoveries, stand aside, and allow me to come forward and lecture
on this matter.

First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for granted, by all
who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that it does or
can produce intoxication.  Now, reader, assure yourself, meo
perieulo, that no quantity of opium ever did or could intoxicate.
As to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum) THAT might
certainly intoxicate if a man could bear to take enough of it; but
why?  Because it contains so much proof spirit, and not because it
contains so much opium.  But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is
incapable of producing any state of body at all resembling that
which is produced by alcohol, and not in DEGREE only incapable, but
even in KIND:  it is not in the quantity of its effects merely, but
in the quality, that it differs altogether.  The pleasure given by
wine is always mounting and tending to a crisis, after which it
declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for
eight or ten hours:  the first, to borrow a technical distinction
from medicine, is a case of acute--the second, the chronic pleasure;
the one is a flame, the other a steady and equable glow.  But the
main distinction lies in this, that whereas wine disorders the
mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper
manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order,
legislation, and harmony.  Wine robs a man of his self-possession;
opium greatly invigorates it.  Wine unsettles and clouds the
judgement, and gives a preternatural brightness and a vivid
exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, the loves and the
hatreds of the drinker; opium, on the contrary, communicates
serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive, and
with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general it gives
simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment,
and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of
primeval or antediluvian health.  Thus, for instance, opium, like
wine, gives an expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections;
but then, with this remarkable difference, that in the sudden
development of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation there
is always more or less of a maudlin character, which exposes it to
the contempt of the bystander.  Men shake hands, swear eternal
friendship, and shed tears, no mortal knows why; and the sensual
creature is clearly uppermost.  But the expansion of the benigner
feelings incident to opium is no febrile access, but a healthy
restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover
upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation of pain that had
disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally
just and good.  True it is that even wine, up to a certain point and
with certain men, rather tends to exalt and to steady the intellect;
I myself, who have never been a great wine-drinker, used to find
that half-a-dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the
faculties--brightened and intensified the consciousness, and gave to
the mind a feeling of being "ponderibus librata suis;" and certainly
it is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man that he is
DISGUISED in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by
sobriety, and it is when they are drinking (as some old gentleman
says in Athenaeus), that men [Greek text]--display themselves in
their true complexion of character, which surely is not disguising
themselves.  But still, wine constantly leads a man to the brink of
absurdity and extravagance, and beyond a certain point it is sure to
volatilise and to disperse the intellectual energies:  whereas opium
always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate
what had been distracted.  In short, to sum up all in one word, a
man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, and feels that
he is, in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely
human, too often the brutal part of his nature; but the opium-eater
(I speak of him who is not suffering from any disease or other
remote effects of opium) feels that the divines part of his nature
is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of
cloudless serenity, and over all is the great light of the majestic
intellect.

This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium:  of
which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member--the alpha
and the omega:  but then it is to be recollected that I speak from
the ground of a large and profound personal experience:  whereas
most of the unscientific {13} authors who have at all treated of
opium, and even of those who have written expressly on the materia
medica, make it evident, from the horror they express of it, that
their experimental knowledge of its action is none at all.  I will,
however, candidly acknowledge that I have met with one person who
bore evidence to its intoxicating power, such as staggered my own
incredulity; for he was a surgeon, and had himself taken opium
largely.  I happened to say to him that his enemies (as I had heard)
charged him with talking nonsense on politics, and that his friends
apologized for him by suggesting that he was constantly in a state
of intoxication from opium.  Now the accusation, said I, is not
prima facie and of necessity an absurd one; but the defence IS.  To
my surprise, however, he insisted that both his enemies and his
friends were in the right.  "I will maintain," said he, "that I DO
talk nonsense; and secondly, I will maintain that I do not talk
nonsense upon principle, or with any view to profit, but solely and
simply, said he, solely and simply--solely and simply (repeating it
three times over), because I am drunk with opium, and THAT daily."
I replied that, as to the allegation of his enemies, as it seemed to
be established upon such respectable testimony, seeing that the
three parties concerned all agree in it, it did not become me to
question it; but the defence set up I must demur to.  He proceeded
to discuss the matter, and to lay down his reasons; but it seemed to
me so impolite to pursue an argument which must have presumed a man
mistaken in a point belonging to his own profession, that I did not
press him even when his course of argument seemed open to objection;
not to mention that a man who talks nonsense, even though "with no
view to profit," is not altogether the most agreeable partner in a
dispute, whether as opponent or respondent.  I confess, however,
that the authority of a surgeon, and one who was reputed a good one,
may seem a weighty one to my prejudice; but still I must plead my
experience, which was greater than his greatest by 7,000 drops a-
day; and though it was not possible to suppose a medical man
unacquainted with the characteristic symptoms of vinous
intoxication, it yet struck me that he might proceed on a logical
error of using the word intoxication with too great latitude, and
extending it generically to all modes of nervous excitement, instead
of restricting it as the expression for a specific sort of
excitement connected with certain diagnostics.  Some people have
maintained in my hearing that they had been drunk upon green tea;
and a medical student in London, for whose knowledge in his
profession I have reason to feel great respect, assured me the other
day that a patient in recovering from an illness had got drunk on a
beef-steak.

Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error in respect to
opium, I shall notice very briefly a second and a third, which are,
that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily
followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and
even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal
and mental.  The first of these errors I shall content myself with
simply denying; assuring my reader that for ten years, during which
I took opium at intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I
allowed myself this luxury was always a day of unusually good
spirits.

With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if we were
to credit the numerous pictures of Turkish opium-eaters) to
accompany the practice of opium-eating, I deny that also.  Certainly
opium is classed under the head of narcotics, and some such effect
it may produce in the end; but the primary effects of opium are
always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the
system.  This first stage of its action always lasted with me,
during my noviciate, for upwards of eight hours; so that it must be
the fault of the opium-eater himself if he does not so time his
exhibition of the dose (to speak medically) as that the whole weight
of its narcotic influence may descend upon his sleep.  Turkish
opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many
equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves.  But
that the reader may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to
stupefy the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by way of treating
the question illustratively, rather than argumentatively) describe
the way in which I myself often passed an opium evening in London
during the period between 1804-1812.  It will be seen that at least
opium did not move me to seek solitude, and much less to seek
inactivity, or the torpid state of self-involution ascribed to the
Turks.  I give this account at the risk of being pronounced a crazy
enthusiast or visionary; but I regard THAT little.  I must desire my
reader to bear in mind that I was a hard student, and at severe
studies for all the rest of my time; and certainly I had a right
occasionally to relaxations as well as other people.  These,
however, I allowed myself but seldom.

The late Duke of--used to say, "Next Friday, by the blessing of
heaven, I purpose to be drunk;" and in like manner I used to fix
beforehand how often within a given time, and when, I would commit a
debauch of opium.  This was seldom more than once in three weeks,
for at that time I could not have ventured to call every day, as I
did afterwards, for "A GLASS OF LAUDANUM NEGUS, WARM, AND WITHOUT
SUGAR."  No, as I have said, I seldom drank laudanum, at that time,
more than once in three weeks:  This was usually on a Tuesday or a
Saturday night; my reason for which was this.  In those days
Grassini sang at the Opera, and her voice was delightful to me
beyond all that I had ever heard.  I know not what may be the state
of the Opera-house now, having never been within its walls for seven
or eight years, but at that time it was by much the most pleasant
place of public resort in London for passing an evening.  Five
shillings admitted one to the gallery, which was subject to far less
annoyance than the pit of the theatres; the orchestra was
distinguished by its sweet and melodious grandeur from all English
orchestras, the composition of which, I confess, is not acceptable
to my ear, from the predominance of the clamorous instruments and
the absolute tyranny of the violin.  The choruses were divine to
hear, and when Grassini appeared in some interlude, as she often
did, and poured forth her passionate soul as Andromache at the tomb
of Hector, &c., I question whether any Turk, of all that ever
entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure
I had.  But, indeed, I honour the barbarians too much by supposing
them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones
of an Englishman.  For music is an intellectual or a sensual
pleasure according to the temperament of him who hears it.  And, by-
the-bye, with the exception of the fine extravaganza on that subject
in "Twelfth Night," I do not recollect more than one thing said
adequately on the subject of music in all literature; it is a
passage in the Religio Medici {14} of Sir T. Brown, and though
chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value,
inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects.  The
mistake of most people is to suppose that it is by the ear they
communicate with music, and therefore that they are purely passive
to its effects.  But this is not so; it is by the reaction of the
mind upon the notices of the ear (the MATTER coming by the senses,
the FORM from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed, and
therefore it is that people of equally good ear differ so much in
this point from one another.  Now, opium, by greatly increasing the
activity of the mind, generally increases, of necessity, that
particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct
out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual
pleasure.  But, says a friend, a succession of musical sounds is to
me like a collection of Arabic characters; I can attach no ideas to
them.  Ideas! my good sir?  There is no occasion for them; all that
class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language
of representative feelings.  But this is a subject foreign to my
present purposes; it is sufficient to say that a chorus, &c., of
elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work,
the whole of my past life--not as if recalled by an act of memory,
but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to
dwell upon; but the detail of its incidents removed or blended in
some hazy abstraction, and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and
sublimed.  All this was to be had for five shillings.  And over and
above the music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all around me,
in the intervals of the performance, the music of the Italian
language talked by Italian women--for the gallery was usually
crowded with Italians--and I listened with a pleasure such as that
with which Weld the traveller lay and listened, in Canada, to the
sweet laughter of Indian women; for the less you understand of a
language, the more sensible you are to the melody or harshness of
its sounds.  For such a purpose, therefore, it was an advantage to
me that I was a poor Italian scholar, reading it but little, and not
speaking it at all, nor understanding a tenth part of what I heard
spoken.

These were my opera pleasures; but another pleasure I had which, as
it could be had only on a Saturday night, occasionally struggled
with my love of the Opera; for at that time Tuesday and Saturday
were the regular opera nights.  On this subject I am afraid I shall
be rather obscure, but I can assure the reader not at all more so
than Marinus in his Life of Proclus, or many other biographers and
autobiographers of fair reputation.  This pleasure, I have said, was
to be had only on a Saturday night.  What, then, was Saturday night
to me more than any other night?  I had no labours that I rested
from, no wages to receive; what needed I to care for Saturday night,
more than as it was a summons to hear Grassini?  True, most logical
reader; what you say is unanswerable.  And yet so it was and is,
that whereas different men throw their feelings into different
channels, and most are apt to show their interest in the concerns of
the poor chiefly by sympathy, expressed in some shape or other, with
their distresses and sorrows, I at that time was disposed to express
my interest by sympathising with their pleasures.  The pains of
poverty I had lately seen too much of, more than I wished to
remember; but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of
spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil, can never become
oppressive to contemplate.  Now Saturday night is the season for the
chief, regular, and periodic return of rest of the poor; in this
point the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of
brotherhood; almost all Christendom rests from its labours.  It is a
rest introductory to another rest, and divided by a whole day and
two nights from the renewal of toil.  On this account I feel always,
on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke
of labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to
enjoy.  For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a
scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire,
I used often on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander
forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all
the markets and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a
Saturday night, for laying out their wages.  Many a family party,
consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his
children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways
and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of
household articles.  Gradually I became familiar with their wishes,
their difficulties, and their opinions.  Sometimes there might be
heard murmurs of discontent, but far oftener expressions on the
countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and
tranquillity.  And taken generally, I must say that, in this point
at least, the poor are more philosophic than the rich--that they
show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as
irremediable evils or irreparable losses.  Whenever I saw occasion,
or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their
parties, and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion, which,
if not always judicious, was always received indulgently.  If wages
were a little higher or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a
little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were
expected to fall, I was glad; yet, if the contrary were true, I drew
from opium some means of consoling myself.  For opium (like the bee,
that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the
soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into compliance with the
master-key.  Some of these rambles led me to great distances, for an
opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and
sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical
principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking
ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating
all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I
came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical
entries, and such sphynx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares,
as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the
intellects of hackney-coachmen.  I could almost have believed at
times that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae
incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the
modern charts of London.  For all this, however, I paid a heavy
price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my
dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and
haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities, moral and
intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and
remorse to the conscience.

Thus I have shown that opium does not of necessity produce
inactivity or torpor, but that, on the contrary, it often led me
into markets and theatres.  Yet, in candour, I will admit that
markets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-
eater when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment.  In that
state, crowds become an oppression to him; music even, too sensual
and gross.  He naturally seeks solitude and silence, as
indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries,
which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human
nature.  I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe
too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly
falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the
sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware
of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract
them.  I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old
legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius; and the remedies I
sought were to force myself into society, and to keep my
understanding in continual activity upon matters of science.  But
for these remedies I should certainly have become hypochondriacally
melancholy.  In after years, however, when my cheerfulness was more
fully re-established, I yielded to my natural inclination for a
solitary life.  And at that time I often fell into these reveries
upon taking opium; and more than once it has happened to me, on a
summer night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from
which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command
a view of the great town of L-, at about the same distance, that I
have sate from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to
move.

I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c., but
THAT shall not alarm me.  Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our
wisest men; and let my reader see if he, in his philosophical works,
be half as unmystical as I am.  I say, then, that it has often
struck me that the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took
place in such a reverie.  The town of L- represented the earth, with
its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor
wholly forgotten.  The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation,
and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the
mind and the mood which then swayed it.  For it seemed to me as if
then first I stood at a distance and aloof from the uproar of life;
as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife were suspended; a
respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of
repose; a resting from human labours.  Here were the hopes which
blossom in the paths of life reconciled with the peace which is in
the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet
for all anxieties a halcyon calm; a tranquillity that seemed no
product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal
antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose.

Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and
rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for "the pangs
that tempt the spirit to rebel," bringest an assuaging balm;
eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the
purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back
the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the
proud man a brief oblivion for


Wrongs undress'd and insults unavenged;


that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of
suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury, and
dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges;--thou buildest
upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the
brain, cities and temples beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles--
beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos, and "from the
anarchy of dreaming sleep" callest into sunny light the faces of
long-buried beauties and the blessed household countenances cleansed
from the "dishonours of the grave."  Thou only givest these gifts to
man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and
mighty opium!


INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM


Courteous, and I hope indulgent, reader (for all MY readers must be
indulgent ones, or else I fear I shall shock them too much to count
on their courtesy), having accompanied me thus far, now let me
request you to move onwards for about eight years; that is to say,
from 1804 (when I have said that my acquaintance with opium first
began) to 1812.  The years of academic life are now over and gone--
almost forgotten; the student's cap no longer presses my temples; if
my cap exist at all, it presses those of some youthful scholar, I
trust, as happy as myself, and as passionate a lover of knowledge.
My gown is by this time, I dare say, in the same condition with many
thousand excellent books in the Bodleian, viz., diligently perused
by certain studious moths and worms; or departed, however (which is
all that I know of his fate), to that great reservoir of SOMEWHERE
to which all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, tea-kettles, &c.,
have departed (not to speak of still frailer vessels, such as
glasses, decanters, bed-makers, &c.), which occasional resemblances
in the present generation of tea-cups, &c., remind me of having once
possessed, but of whose departure and final fate I, in common with
most gownsmen of either university, could give, I suspect, but an
obscure and conjectural history.  The persecutions of the chapel-
bell, sounding its unwelcome summons to six o'clock matins,
interrupts my slumbers no longer, the porter who rang it, upon whose
beautiful nose (bronze, inlaid with copper) I wrote, in retaliation
so many Greek epigrams whilst I was dressing, is dead, and has
ceased to disturb anybody; and I, and many others who suffered much
from his tintinnabulous propensities, have now agreed to overlook
his errors, and have forgiven him.  Even with the bell I am now in
charity; it rings, I suppose, as formerly, thrice a-day, and cruelly
annoys, I doubt not, many worthy gentlemen, and disturbs their peace
of mind; but as to me, in this year 1812, I regard its treacherous
voice no longer (treacherous I call it, for, by some refinement of
malice, it spoke in as sweet and silvery tones as if it had been
inviting one to a party); its tones have no longer, indeed, power to
reach me, let the wind sit as favourable as the malice of the bell
itself could wish, for I am 250 miles away from it, and buried in
the depth of mountains.  And what am I doing among the mountains?
Taking opium.  Yes; but what else?  Why reader, in 1812, the year we
are now arrived at, as well as for some years previous, I have been
chiefly studying German metaphysics in the writings of Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, &c.  And how and in what manner do I live?--in short,
what class or description of men do I belong to?  I am at this
period--viz. in 1812--living in a cottage and with a single female
servant (honi soit qui mal y pense), who amongst my neighbours
passes by the name of my "housekeeper."  And as a scholar and a man
of learned education, and in that sense a gentleman, I may presume
to class myself as an unworthy member of that indefinite body called
GENTLEMEN.  Partly on the ground I have assigned perhaps, partly
because from my having no visible calling or business, it is rightly
judged that I must be living on my private fortune; I am so classed
by my neighbours; and by the courtesy of modern England I am usually
addressed on letters, &c., "Esquire," though having, I fear, in the
rigorous construction of heralds, but slender pretensions to that
distinguished honour; yet in popular estimation I am X. Y. Z.,
Esquire, but not justice of the Peace nor Custos Rotulorum.  Am I
married?  Not yet.  And I still take opium?  On Saturday nights.
And perhaps have taken it unblushingly ever since "the rainy
Sunday," and "the stately Pantheon," and "the beatific druggist" of
1804?  Even so.  And how do I find my health after all this opium-
eating?  In short, how do I do?  Why, pretty well, I thank you,
reader; in the phrase of ladies in the straw, "as well as can be
expected."  In fact, if I dared to say the real and simple truth,
though, to satisfy the theories of medical men, I OUGHT to be ill, I
never was better in my life than in the spring of 1812; and I hope
sincerely that the quantity of claret, port, or "particular
Madeira," which in all probability you, good reader, have taken, and
design to take for every term of eight years during your natural
life, may as little disorder your health as mine was disordered by
the opium I had taken for eight years, between 1804 and 1812.  Hence
you may see again the danger of taking any medical advice from
Anastasius; in divinity, for aught I know, or law, he may be a safe
counsellor; but not in medicine.  No; it is far better to consult
Dr. Buchan, as I did; for I never forgot that worthy man's excellent
suggestion, and I was "particularly careful not to take above five-
and-twenty ounces of laudanum."  To this moderation and temperate
use of the article I may ascribe it, I suppose, that as yet, at
least (i.e. in 1812), I am ignorant and unsuspicious of the avenging
terrors which opium has in store for those who abuse its lenity.  At
the same time, it must not be forgotten that hitherto I have been
only a dilettante eater of opium; eight years' practice even, with a
single precaution of allowing sufficient intervals between every
indulgence, has not been sufficient to make opium necessary to me as
an article of daily diet.  But now comes a different era.  Move on,
if you please, reader, to 1813.  In the summer of the year we have
just quitted I have suffered much in bodily health from distress of
mind connected with a very melancholy event.  This event being no
ways related to the subject now before me, further than through the
bodily illness which it produced, I need not more particularly
notice.  Whether this illness of 1812 had any share in that of 1813
I know not; but so it was, that in the latter year I was attacked by
a most appalling irritation of the stomach, in all respects the same
as that which had caused me so much suffering in youth, and
accompanied by a revival of all the old dreams.  This is the point
of my narrative on which, as respects my own self-justification, the
whole of what follows may be said to hinge.  And here I find myself
in a perplexing dilemma.  Either, on the one hand, I must exhaust
the reader's patience by such a detail of my malady, or of my
struggles with it, as might suffice to establish the fact of my
inability to wrestle any longer with irritation and constant
suffering; or, on the other hand, by passing lightly over this
critical part of my story, I must forego the benefit of a stronger
impression left on the mind of the reader, and must lay myself open
to the misconstruction of having slipped, by the easy and gradual
steps of self-indulging persons, from the first to the final stage
of opium-eating (a misconstruction to which there will be a lurking
predisposition in most readers, from my previous acknowledgements).
This is the dilemma, the first horn of which would be sufficient to
toss and gore any column of patient readers, though drawn up sixteen
deep and constantly relieved by fresh men; consequently that is not
to be thought of.  It remains, then, that I POSTULALE so much as is
necessary for my purpose.  And let me take as full credit for what I
postulate as if I had demonstrated it, good reader, at the expense
of your patience and my own.  Be not so ungenerous as to let me
suffer in your good opinion through my own forbearance and regard
for your comfort.  No; believe all that I ask of you--viz., that I
could resist no longer; believe it liberally and as an act of grace,
or else in mere prudence; for if not, then in the next edition of my
Opium Confessions, revised and enlarged, I will make you believe and
tremble; and a force d'ennuyer, by mere dint of pandiculation I will
terrify all readers of mine from ever again questioning any
postulate that I shall think fit to make.

This, then, let me repeat, I postulate--that at the time I began to
take opium daily I could not have done otherwise.  Whether, indeed,
afterwards I might not have succeeded in breaking off the habit,
even when it seemed to me that all efforts would be unavailing, and
whether many of the innumerable efforts which I did make might not
have been carried much further, and my gradual reconquests of ground
lost might not have been followed up much more energetically--these
are questions which I must decline.  Perhaps I might make out a case
of palliation; but shall I speak ingenuously?  I confess it, as a
besetting infirmity of mine, that I am too much of an Eudaemonist; I
hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and
others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of
sufficient firmness, and am little capable of encountering present
pain for the sake of any reversionary benefit.  On some other
matters I can agree with the gentlemen in the cotton trade {15} at
Manchester in affecting the Stoic philosophy, but not in this.  Here
I take the liberty of an Eclectic philosopher, and I look out for
some courteous and considerate sect that will condescend more to the
infirm condition of an opium-eater; that are "sweet men," as Chaucer
says, "to give absolution," and will show some conscience in the
penances they inflict, and the efforts of abstinence they exact from
poor sinners like myself.  An inhuman moralist I can no more endure
in my nervous state than opium that has not been boiled.  At any
rate, he who summons me to send out a large freight of self-denial
and mortification upon any cruising voyage of moral improvement,
must make it clear to my understanding that the concern is a hopeful
one.  At my time of life (six-and-thirty years of age) it cannot be
supposed that I have much energy to spare; in fact, I find it all
little enough for the intellectual labours I have on my hands, and
therefore let no man expect to frighten me by a few hard words into
embarking any part of it upon desperate adventures of morality.

Whether desperate or not, however, the issue of the struggle in 1813
was what I have mentioned, and from this date the reader is to
consider me as a regular and confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask
whether on any particular day he had or had not taken opium, would
be to ask whether his lungs had performed respiration, or the heart
fulfilled its functions.  You understand now, reader, what I am, and
you are by this time aware that no old gentleman "with a snow-white
beard" will have any chance of persuading me to surrender "the
little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug."  No; I give notice
to all, whether moralists or surgeons, that whatever be their
pretensions and skill in their respective lines of practice, they
must not hope for any countenance from me, if they think to begin by
any savage proposition for a Lent or a Ramadan of abstinence from
opium.  This, then, being all fully understood between us, we shall
in future sail before the wind.  Now then, reader, from 1813, where
all this time we have been sitting down and loitering, rise up, if
you please, and walk forward about three years more.  Now draw up
the curtain, and you shall see me in a new character.

If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us what had
been the happiest day in his life, and the why and the wherefore, I
suppose that we should all cry out--Hear him!  Hear him!  As to the
happiest DAY, that must be very difficult for any wise man to name,
because any event that could occupy so distinguished a place in a
man's retrospect of his life, or be entitled to have shed a special
felicity on any one day, ought to be of such an enduring character
as that (accidents apart) it should have continued to shed the same
felicity, or one not distinguishably less, on many years together.
To the happiest LUSTRUM, however, or even to the happiest YEAR, it
may be allowed to any man to point without discountenance from
wisdom.  This year, in my case, reader, was the one which we have
now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a parenthesis between
years of a gloomier character.  It was a year of brilliant water (to
speak after the manner of jewellers), set as it were, and insulated,
in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium.  Strange as it may
sound, I had a little before this time descended suddenly, and
without any considerable effort, from 320 grains of opium (i.e.
eight {16} thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or
one-eighth part.  Instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of
profoundest melancholy which rested upon my brain, like some black
vapours that I have seen roll away from the summits of mountains,
drew off in one day ([Greek text]); passed off with its murky
banners as simultaneously as a ship that has been stranded, and is
floated off by a spring tide -


That moveth altogether, if it move at all.


Now, then, I was again happy; I now took only 1000 drops of laudanum
per day; and what was that?  A latter spring had come to close up
the season of youth; my brain performed its functions as healthily
as ever before; I read Kant again, and again I understood him, or
fancied that I did.  Again my feelings of pleasure expanded
themselves to all around me; and if any man from Oxford or
Cambridge, or from neither, had been announced to me in my
unpretending cottage, I should have welcomed him with as sumptuous a
reception as so poor a man could offer.  Whatever else was wanting
to a wise man's happiness, of laudanum I would have given him as
much as he wished, and in a golden cup.  And, by the way, now that I
speak of giving laudanum away, I remember about this time a little
incident, which I mention because, trifling as it was, the reader
will soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced more
fearfully than could be imagined.  One day a Malay knocked at my
door.  What business a Malay could have to transact amongst English
mountains I cannot conjecture; but possibly he was on his road to a
seaport about forty miles distant.

The servant who opened the door to him was a young girl, born and
bred amongst the mountains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of
any sort; his turban therefore confounded her not a little; and as
it turned out that his attainments in English were exactly of the
same extent as hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an impassable
gulf fixed between all communication of ideas, if either party had
happened to possess any.  In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting
the reputed learning of her master (and doubtless giving me credit
for a knowledge of all the languages of the earth besides perhaps a
few of the lunar ones), came and gave me to understand that there
was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my art
could exorcise from the house.  I did not immediately go down, but
when I did, the group which presented itself, arranged as it was by
accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my
eye in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhibited in the
ballets at the Opera-house, though so ostentatiously complex, had
ever done.  In a cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with dark
wood that from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more like
a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the Malay--his
turban and loose trousers of dingy white relieved upon the dark
panelling.  He had placed himself nearer to the girl than she seemed
to relish, though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity
contended with the feeling of simple awe which her countenance
expressed as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before her.  And a more
striking picture there could not be imagined than the beautiful
English face of the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with
her erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and
bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany by
marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish
gestures and adorations.  Half-hidden by the ferocious-looking Malay
was a little child from a neighbouring cottage who had crept in
after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head and gazing
upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one
hand he caught at the dress of the young woman for protection.  My
knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being
indeed confined to two words--the Arabic word for barley and the
Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I have learned from Anastasius;
and as I had neither a Malay dictionary nor even Adelung's
Mithridates, which might have helped me to a few words, I addressed
him in some lines from the Iliad, considering that, of such
languages as I possessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came
geographically nearest to an Oriental one.  He worshipped me in a
most devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay.  In
this way I saved my reputation with my neighbours, for the Malay had
no means of betraying the secret.  He lay down upon the floor for
about an hour, and then pursued his journey.  On his departure I
presented him with a piece of opium.  To him, as an Orientalist, I
concluded that opium must be familiar; and the expression of his
face convinced me that it was.  Nevertheless, I was struck with some
little consternation when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his
mouth, and, to use the schoolboy phrase, bolt the whole, divided
into three pieces, at one mouthful.  The quantity was enough to kill
three dragoons and their horses, and I felt some alarm for the poor
creature; but what could be done?  I had given him the opium in
compassion for his solitary life, on recollecting that if he had
travelled on foot from London it must be nearly three weeks since he
could have exchanged a thought with any human being.  I could not
think of violating the laws of hospitality by having him seized and
drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening him into a notion that
we were going to sacrifice him to some English idol.  No:  there was
clearly no help for it.  He took his leave, and for some days I felt
anxious, but as I never heard of any Malay being found dead, I
became convinced that he was used {17} to opium; and that I must
have done him the service I designed by giving him one night of
respite from the pains of wandering.

This incident I have digressed to mention, because this Malay
(partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly
from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened
afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse
than himself, that ran "a-muck" {18} at me, and led me into a world
of troubles.  But to quit this episode, and to return to my
intercalary year of happiness.  I have said already, that on a
subject so important to us all as happiness, we should listen with
pleasure to any man's experience or experiments, even though he were
but a plough-boy, who cannot be supposed to have ploughed very deep
into such an intractable soil as that of human pains and pleasures,
or to have conducted his researches upon any very enlightened
principles.  But I who have taken happiness both in a solid and
liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India and Turkey--
who have conducted my experiments upon this interesting subject with
a sort of galvanic battery, and have, for the general benefit of the
world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 8000 drops
of laudanum per day (just for the same reason as a French surgeon
inoculated himself lately with cancer, an English one twenty years
ago with plague, and a third, I know not of what nation, with
hydrophobia), I (it will be admitted) must surely know what
happiness is, if anybody does.  And therefore I will here lay down
an analysis of happiness; and as the most interesting mode of
communicating it, I will give it, not didactically, but wrapped up
and involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every evening
during the intercalary year when laudanum, though taken daily, was
to me no more than the elixir of pleasure.  This done, I shall quit
the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different
one--THE PAINS OF OPIUM.

Let there be a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any
town--no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters
of a mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that
all the family resident within its circuit will compose, as it were,
one larger household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or
less interesting to your affections.  Let the mountains be real
mountains, between 3,000 and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real
cottage, not (as a witty author has it) "a cottage with a double
coach-house;" let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual
scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen
as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls and clustering
round the windows through all the months of spring, summer, and
autumn--beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine.
Let it, however, NOT be spring, nor summer, nor autumn, but winter
in his sternest shape.  This is a most important point in the
science of happiness.  And I am surprised to see people overlook it,
and think it matter of congratulation that winter is going, or, if
coming, is not likely to be a severe one.  On the contrary, I put up
a petition annually for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one
kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford us.  Surely
everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter
fireside, candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair
tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on
the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without,


And at the doors and windows seem to call,
As heav'n and earth they would together mell;
Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.
Castle of Indolence.


All these are items in the description of a winter evening which
must surely be familiar to everybody born in a high latitude.  And
it is evident that most of these delicacies, like ice-cream, require
a very low temperature of the atmosphere to produce them; they are
fruits which cannot be ripened without weather stormy or inclement
in some way or other.  I am not "PARTICULAR," as people say, whether
it be snow, or black frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr.--says)
"you may lean your back against it like a post."  I can put up even
with rain, provided it rains cats and dogs; but something of the
sort I must have, and if I have it not, I think myself in a manner
ill-used; for why am I called on to pay so heavily for winter, in
coals and candles, and various privations that will occur even to
gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good of its kind?  No, a
Canadian winter for my money, or a Russian one, where every man is
but a co-proprietor with the north wind in the fee-simple of his own
ears.  Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter that I cannot
relish a winter night fully if it be much past St. Thomas's day, and
have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal appearances.
No, it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all
return of light and sunshine.  From the latter weeks of October to
Christmas Eve, therefore, is the period during which happiness is in
season, which, in my judgment, enters the room with the tea-tray;
for tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse
nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible
of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the
favourite beverage of the intellectual; and, for my part, I would
have joined Dr. Johnson in a bellum internecinum against Jonas
Hanway, or any other impious person, who should presume to disparage
it.  But here, to save myself the trouble of too much verbal
description, I will introduce a painter, and give him directions for
the rest of the picture.  Painters do not like white cottages,
unless a good deal weather-stained; but as the reader now
understands that it is a winter night, his services will not be
required except for the inside of the house.

Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than
seven and a half feet high.  This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously
styled in my family the drawing-room; but being contrived "a double
debt to pay," it is also, and more justly, termed the library, for
it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am
richer than my neighbours.  Of these I have about five thousand,
collected gradually since my eighteenth year.  Therefore, painter,
put as many as you can into this room.  Make it populous with books,
and, furthermore, paint me a good fire, and furniture plain and
modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar.  And near
the fire paint me a tea-table, and (as it is clear that no creature
can come to see one such a stormy night) place only two cups and
saucers on the tea-tray; and, if you know how to paint such a thing
symbolically or otherwise, paint me an eternal tea-pot--eternal a
parte ante and a parte post--for I usually drink tea from eight
o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning.  And as it is very
unpleasant to make tea or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a
lovely young woman sitting at the table.  Paint her arms like
Aurora's and her smiles like Hebe's.  But no, dear M., not even in
jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests
upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty, or that the
witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly
pencil.  Pass then, my good painter, to something more within its
power; and the next article brought forward should naturally be
myself--a picture of the Opium-eater, with his "little golden
receptacle of the pernicious drug" lying beside him on the table.
As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of THAT,
though I would rather see the original.  You may paint it if you
choose, but I apprise you that no "little" receptacle would, even in
1816, answer MY purpose, who was at a distance from the "stately
Pantheon," and all druggists (mortal or otherwise).  No, you may as
well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass,
and as much like a wine-decanter as possible.  Into this you may put
a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum; that, and a book of German
Metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in
the neighbourhood.  But as to myself--there I demur.  I admit that,
naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground of the picture; that
being the hero of the piece, or (if you choose) the criminal at the
bar, my body should be had into court.  This seems reasonable; but
why should I confess on this point to a painter? or why confess at
all?  If the public (into whose private ear I am confidentially
whispering my confessions, and not into any painter's) should chance
to have framed some agreeable picture for itself of the Opium-
eater's exterior, should have ascribed to him, romantically an
elegant person or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear
from it so pleasing a delusion--pleasing both to the public and to
me?  No; paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy, and as a
painter's fancy should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail
in that way to be a gainer.  And now, reader, we have run through
all the ten categories of my condition as it stood about 1816-17, up
to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to have been a
happy man, and the elements of that happiness I have endeavoured to
place before you in the above sketch of the interior of a scholar's
library, in a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter
evening.

But now, farewell--a long farewell--to happiness, winter or summer!
Farewell to smiles and laughter!  Farewell to peace of mind!
Farewell to hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the blessed
consolations of sleep.  For more than three years and a half I am
summoned away from these.  I am now arrived at an Iliad of woes, for
I have now to record


THE PAINS OF OPIUM


As when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
SHELLEY'S Revolt of Islam.

Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your
attention to a brief explanatory note on three points:

1.  For several reasons I have not been able to compose the notes
for this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape.
I give the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them
up from memory.  Some of them point to their own date, some I have
dated, and some are undated.  Whenever it could answer my purpose to
transplant them from the natural or chronological order, I have not
scrupled to do so.  Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in
the past tense.  Few of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at
the period of time to which they relate; but this can little affect
their accuracy, as the impressions were such that they can never
fade from my mind.  Much has been omitted.  I could not, without
effort, constrain myself to the task of either recalling, or
constructing into a regular narrative, the whole burthen of horrors
which lies upon my brain.  This feeling partly I plead in excuse,
and partly that I am now in London, and am a helpless sort of
person, who cannot even arrange his own papers without assistance;
and I am separated from the hands which are wont to perform for me
the offices of an amanuensis.

2.  You will think perhaps that I am too confidential and
communicative of my own private history.  It may be so.  But my way
of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than
much to consider who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider
what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come
to doubt whether any part at all is proper.  The fact is, I place
myself at a distance of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time,
and suppose myself writing to those who will be interested about me
hereafter; and wishing to have some record of time, the entire
history of which no one can know but myself, I do it as fully as I
am able with the efforts I am now capable of making, because I know
not whether I can ever find time to do it again.

3.  It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself
from the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it?  To
this I must answer briefly:  it might be supposed that I yielded to
the fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any
man can be charmed by its terrors.  The reader may be sure,
therefore, that I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity.
I add, that those who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and
not myself, were the first to beg me to desist.  But could not have
I reduced it a drop a day, or, by adding water, have bisected or
trisected a drop?  A thousand drops bisected would thus have taken
nearly six years to reduce, and that way would certainly not have
answered.  But this is a common mistake of those who know nothing of
opium experimentally; I appeal to those who do, whether it is not
always found that down to a certain point it can be reduced with
ease and even pleasure, but that after that point further reduction
causes intense suffering.  Yes, say many thoughtless persons, who
know not what they are talking of, you will suffer a little low
spirits and dejection for a few days.  I answer, no; there is
nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal spirits
are uncommonly raised:  the pulse is improved:  the health is
better.  It is not there that the suffering lies.  It has no
resemblance to the sufferings caused by renouncing wine.  It is a
state of unutterable irritation of stomach (which surely is not much
like dejection), accompanied by intense perspirations, and feelings
such as I shall not attempt to describe without more space at my
command.

I shall now enter in medias res, and shall anticipate, from a time
when my opium pains might be said to be at their acme, an account of
their palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.


My studies have now been long interrupted.  I cannot read to myself
with any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance.  Yet I read
aloud sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the word
"accomplishment" as a superficial and ornamental attainment, almost
the only one I possess; and formerly, if I had any vanity at all
connected with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with
this, for I had observed that no accomplishment was so rare.
Players are the worst readers of all: --reads vilely; and Mrs. -,
who is so celebrated, can read nothing well but dramatic
compositions:  Milton she cannot read sufferably.  People in general
either read poetry without any passion at all, or else overstep the
modesty of nature, and read not like scholars.  Of late, if I have
felt moved by anything it has been by the grand lamentations of
Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in
Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself.  A young lady
sometimes comes and drinks tea with us:  at her request and M.'s, I
now and then read W-'s poems to them.  (W., by-the-bye is the only
poet I ever met who could read his own verses:  often indeed he
reads admirably.)

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book, but one; and I
owe it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to
mention what that was.  The sublimer and more passionate poets I
still read, as I have said, by snatches, and occasionally.  But my
proper vocation, as I well know, was the exercise of the analytic
understanding.  Now, for the most part analytic studies are
continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary
efforts.  Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, &c,,
were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them with a sense
of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an anguish the
greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them to my
own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had
devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect,
blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing
one single work, to which I had presumed to give the title of an
unfinished work of Spinosa's--viz., De Emendatione Humani
Intellectus.  This was now lying locked up, as by frost, like any
Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the
resources of the architect; and instead of reviving me as a monument
of wishes at least, and aspirations, and a life of labour dedicated
to the exaltation of human nature in that way in which God had best
fitted me to promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a
memorial to my children of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of
materials uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that were never
to support a super-structure--of the grief and the ruin of the
architect.  In this state of imbecility I had, for amusement, turned
my attention to political economy; my understanding, which formerly
had been as active and restless as a hyaena, could not, I suppose
(so long as I lived at all) sink into utter lethargy; and political
economy offers this advantage to a person in my state, that though
it is eminently an organic science (no part, that is to say, but
what acts on the whole as the whole again reacts on each part), yet
the several parts may be detached and contemplated singly.  Great as
was the prostration of my powers at this time, yet I could not
forget my knowledge; and my understanding had been for too many
years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great
masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of the
main herd of modern economists.  I had been led in 1811 to look into
loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my
desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, or
parts of parliamentary debates.  I saw that these were generally the
very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of
sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic
adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists,
and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and
thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder with a lady's fan.  At
length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo's
book; and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent
of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished
the first chapter, "Thou art the man!"  Wonder and curiosity were
emotions that had long been dead in me.  Yet I wondered once more:
I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the
effort of reading, and much more I wondered at the book.  Had this
profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth
century?  Was it possible?  I supposed thinking {19} had been
extinct in England.  Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in
academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares,
had accomplished what all the universities of Europe and a century
of thought had failed even to advance by one hair's breadth?  All
other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight
of facts and documents.  Mr. Ricardo had deduced a priori from the
understanding itself laws which first gave a ray of light into the
unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a
collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular
proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.

Thus did one single work of a profound understanding avail to give
me a pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years.  It
roused me even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for
me.  It seemed to me that some important truths had escaped even
"the inevitable eye" of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most
part of such a nature that I could express or illustrate them more
briefly and elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy
and loitering diction of economists, the whole would not have filled
a pocket-book; and being so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even
at this time, incapable as I was of all general exertion, I drew up
my PROLEGOMENA TO ALL FUTURE SYSTEMS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.  I hope
it will not be found redolent of opium; though, indeed, to most
people the subject is a sufficient opiate.

This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the sequel
showed; for I designed to publish my work.  Arrangements were made
at a provincial press, about eighteen miles distant, for printing
it.  An additional compositor was retained for some days on this
account.  The work was even twice advertised, and I was in a manner
pledged to the fulfilment of my intention.  But I had a preface to
write, and a dedication, which I wished to make a splendid one, to
Mr. Ricardo.  I found myself quite unable to accomplish all this.
The arrangements were countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and
my "Prolegomena" rested peacefully by the side of its elder and more
dignified brother.

I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in
terms that apply more or less to every part of the four years during
which I was under the Circean spells of opium.  But for misery and
suffering, I might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant
state.  I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter; an
answer of a few words to any that I received was the utmost that I
could accomplish, and often THAT not until the letter had lain weeks
or even months on my writing-table.  Without the aid of M. all
records of bills paid or TO BE paid must have perished, and my whole
domestic economy, whatever became of Political Economy, must have
gone into irretrievable confusion.  I shall not afterwards allude to
this part of the case.  It is one, however, which the opium-eater
will find, in the end, as oppressive and tormenting as any other,
from the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from the direct
embarrassments incident to the neglect or procrastination of each
day's appropriate duties, and from the remorse which must often
exasperate the stings of these evils to a reflective and
conscientious mind.  The opium-eater loses none of his moral
sensibilities or aspirations.  He wishes and longs as earnestly as
ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted
by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible
infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of
power to attempt.  He lies under the weight of incubus and
nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just
as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a
relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage
offered to some object of his tenderest love:  he curses the spells
which chain him down from motion; he would lay down his life if he
might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and
cannot even attempt to rise.

I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions,
to the history and journal of what took place in my dreams, for
these were the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest
suffering.

The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part
of my physical economy was from the reawakening of a state of eye
generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability.
I know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps
most, have a power of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all
sorts of phantoms.  In some that power is simply a mechanical
affection of the eye; others have a voluntary or semi-voluntary
power to dismiss or to summon them; or, as a child once said to me
when I questioned him on this matter, "I can tell them to go, and
they go -, but sometimes they come when I don't tell them to come."
Whereupon I told him that he had almost as unlimited a command over
apparitions as a Roman centurion over his soldiers.--In the middle
of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively
distressing to me:  at night, when I lay awake in bed, vast
processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending
stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were
stories drawn from times before OEdipus or Priam, before Tyre,
before Memphis.  And at the same time a corresponding change took
place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up
within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than
earthly splendour.  And the four following facts may be mentioned as
noticeable at this time:

1.  That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy
seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the
brain in one point--that whatsoever I happened to call up and to
trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer
itself to my dreams, so that I feared to exercise this faculty; for,
as Midas turned all things to gold that yet baffled his hopes and
defrauded his human desires, so whatsoever things capable of being
visually represented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately
shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and by a process
apparently no less inevitable, when thus once traced in faint and
visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn
out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams into insufferable splendour
that fretted my heart.

2.  For this and all other changes in my dreams were accompanied by
deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly
incommunicable by words.  I seemed every night to descend, not
metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless
abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I
could ever reascend.  Nor did I, by waking, feel that I HAD
reascended.  This I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom
which attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at last to utter
darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by
words.

3.  The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected.  Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive.
Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable
infinity.  This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast
expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100
years in one night--nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a
millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far
beyond the limits of any human experience.

4.  The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of
later years, were often revived:  I could not be said to recollect
them, for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have
been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience.  But
placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and
clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying
feelings, I RECOGNISED them instantaneously.  I was once told by a
near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a
river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical
assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in
its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a
mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for
comprehending the whole and every part.  This, from some opium
experiences of mine, I can believe; I have indeed seen the same
thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark
which I am convinced is true; viz., that the dread book of account
which the Scriptures speak of is in fact the mind itself of each
individual.  Of this at least I feel assured, that there is no such
thing as FORGETTING possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may
and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the
secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will
also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the
inscription remains for ever, just as the stars seem to withdraw
before the common light of day, whereas in fact we all know that it
is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are
waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have
withdrawn.

Having noticed these four facts as memorably distinguishing my
dreams from those of health, I shall now cite a case illustrative of
the first fact, and shall then cite any others that I remember,
either in their chronological order, or any other that may give them
more effect as pictures to the reader.

I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional amusement, a
great reader of Livy, whom I confess that I prefer, both for style
and matter, to any other of the Roman historians; and I had often
felt as most solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphatically
representative of the majesty of the Roman people, the two words so
often occurring in Livy--Consul Romanus, especially when the consul
is introduced in his military character.  I mean to say that the
words king, sultan, regent, &c., or any other titles of those who
embody in their own persons the collective majesty of a great
people, had less power over my reverential feelings.  I had also,
though no great reader of history, made myself minutely and
critically familiar with one period of English history, viz., the
period of the Parliamentary War, having been attracted by the moral
grandeur of some who figured in that day, and by the many
interesting memoirs which survive those unquiet times.  Both these
parts of my lighter reading, having furnished me often with matter
of reflection, now furnished me with matter for my dreams.  Often I
used to see, after painting upon the blank darkness a sort of
rehearsal whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival
and dances.  And I heard it said, or I said to myself, "These are
English ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I.  These are the
wives and the daughters of those who met in peace, and sate at the
same table, and were allied by marriage or by blood; and yet, after
a certain day in August 1642, never smiled upon each other again,
nor met but in the field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury,
or at Naseby, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, and
washed away in blood the memory of ancient friendship."  The ladies
danced, and looked as lovely as the court of George IV.  Yet I knew,
even in my dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two
centuries.  This pageant would suddenly dissolve; and at a clapping
of hands would be heard the heart-quaking sound OF CONSUL ROMANUS;
and immediately came "sweeping by," in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus
or Marius, girt round by a company of centurions, with the crimson
tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos of the Roman
legions.

Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's, Antiquities of
Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of
plates by that artist, called his DREAMS, and which record the
scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever.  Some of
them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account)
represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts
of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers,
catapults, &c. &c., expressive of enormous power put forth and
resistance overcome.  Creeping along the sides of the walls you
perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was
Piranesi himself:  follow the stairs a little further and you
perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any
balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the
extremity except into the depths below.  Whatever is to become of
poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his labours must in some
way terminate here.  But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight
of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but
this time standing on the very brink of the abyss.  Again elevate
your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and
again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on,
until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper
gloom of the hall.  With the same power of endless growth and self-
reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.  In the early
stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly
architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was
never yet beheld by the waking eye unless in the clouds.  From a
great modern poet I cite part of a passage which describes, as an
appearance actually beheld in the clouds, what in many of its
circumstances I saw frequently in sleep:


The appearance, instantaneously disclosed,
Was of a mighty city--boldly say
A wilderness of building, sinking far
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth,
Far sinking into splendour--without end!
Fabric it seem'd of diamond, and of gold,
With alabaster domes, and silver spires,
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high
Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright
In avenues disposed; there towers begirt
With battlements that on their restless fronts
Bore stars--illumination of all gems!
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought
Upon the dark materials of the storm
Now pacified; on them, and on the coves,
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto
The vapours had receded,--taking there
Their station under a cerulean sky.  &c. &c.


The sublime circumstance, "battlements that on their RESTLESS fronts
bore stars," might have been copied from my architectural dreams,
for it often occurred.  We hear it reported of Dryden and of Fuseli,
in modern times, that they thought proper to eat raw meat for the
sake of obtaining splendid dreams:  how much better for such a
purpose to have eaten opium, which yet I do not remember that any
poet is recorded to have done, except the dramatist Shadwell; and in
ancient days Homer is I think rightly reputed to have known the
virtues of opium.

To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of
water:  these haunted me so much that I feared (though possibly it
will appear ludicrous to a medical man) that some dropsical state or
tendency of the brain might thus be making itself (to use a
metaphysical word) OBJECTIVE; and the sentient organ PROJECT itself
as its own object.  For two months I suffered greatly in my head, a
part of my bodily structure which had hitherto been so clear from
all touch or taint of weakness (physically I mean) that I used to
say of it, as the last Lord Orford said of his stomach, that it
seemed likely to survive the rest of my person.  Till now I had
never felt a headache even, or any the slightest pain, except
rheumatic pains caused by my own folly.  However, I got over this
attack, though it must have been verging on something very
dangerous.

The waters now changed their character--from translucent lakes
shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans.  And now came
a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll
through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it
never left me until the winding up of my case.  Hitherto the human
face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any
special power of tormenting.  But now that which I have called the
tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself.  Perhaps some part
of my London life might be answerable for this.  Be that as it may,
now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face
began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces
upturned to the heavens--faces imploring, wrathful, despairing,
surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by
centuries:  my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged
with the ocean.


May 1818


The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months.  I have been every
night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes.  I know
not whether others share in my feelings on this point; but I have
often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to
live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and
scenery, I should go mad.  The causes of my horror lie deep, and
some of them must be common to others.  Southern Asia in general is
the seat of awful images and associations.  As the cradle of the
human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling
connected with it.  But there are other reasons.  No man can pretend
that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or
of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is
affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions
of Indostan, &c.  The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their
institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that
to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of
youth in the individual.  A young Chinese seems to me an
antediluvian man renewed.  Even Englishmen, though not bred in any
knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic
sublimity of CASTES that have flowed apart, and refused to mix,
through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be
awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates.  It contributes
much to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for
thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human
life, the great officina gentium.  Man is a weed in those regions.
The vast empires also in which the enormous population of Asia has
always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings
associated with all Oriental names or images.  In China, over and
above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am
terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of
utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings
deeper than I can analyse.  I could sooner live with lunatics or
brute animals.  All this, and much more than I can say or have time
to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the
unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and
mythological tortures impressed upon me.  Under the connecting
feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together
all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages
and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and
assembled them together in China or Indostan.  From kindred
feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law.
I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by
parroquets, by cockatoos.  I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for
centuries at the summit or in secret rooms:  I was the idol; I was
the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed.  I fled from the
wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia:  Vishnu hated me:
Seeva laid wait for me.  I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris:  I
had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile
trembled at.  I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins,
with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of
eternal pyramids.  I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by
crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things,
amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental
dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous
scenery that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer
astonishment.  Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that
swallowed up the astonishment, and left me not so much in terror as
in hatred and abomination of what I saw.  Over every form, and
threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a
sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as
of madness.  Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight
exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered.  All
before had been moral and spiritual terrors.  But here the main
agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the
last.  The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror
than almost all the rest.  I was compelled to live with him, and (as
was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries.  I escaped
sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c.
All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with
life:  the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes,
looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I
stood loathing and fascinated.  And so often did this hideous
reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was
broken up in the very same way:  I heard gentle voices speaking to
me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke.
It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at
my bedside--come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or
to let me see them dressed for going out.  I protest that so awful
was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other
unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of
innocent HUMAN natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden
revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed
their faces.


June 1819


I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my life, that
the deaths of those whom we love, and indeed the contemplation of
death generally, is (caeteris paribus) more affecting in summer than
in any other season of the year.  And the reasons are these three, I
think:  first, that the visible heavens in summer appear far higher,
more distant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) more infinite;
the clouds, by which chiefly the eye expounds the distance of the
blue pavilion stretched over our heads, are in summer more
voluminous, massed and accumulated in far grander and more towering
piles.  Secondly, the light and the appearances of the declining and
the setting sun are much more fitted to be types and characters of
the Infinite.  And thirdly (which is the main reason), the exuberant
and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more
powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry
sterility of the grave.  For it may be observed generally, that
wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of
antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt
to suggest each other.  On these accounts it is that I find it
impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in
the endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not more
affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly
in that season.  Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident which I
omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following
dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed
in my mind; but having been once roused it never left me, and split
into a thousand fantastic varieties, which often suddenly reunited,
and composed again the original dream.

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was Easter
Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning.  I was standing, as it
seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage.  Right before me lay
the very scene which could really be commanded from that situation,
but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams.
There were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their
feet; but the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and
there was interspace far larger between them of meadows and forest
lawns; the hedges were rich with white roses; and no living creature
was to be seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were
cattle tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly
round about the grave of a child whom I had tenderly loved, just as
I had really beheld them, a little before sunrise in the same
summer, when that child died.  I gazed upon the well-known scene,
and I said aloud (as I thought) to myself, "It yet wants much of
sunrise, and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on which they
celebrate the first fruits of resurrection.  I will walk abroad; old
griefs shall be forgotten to-day; for the air is cool and still, and
the hills are high and stretch away to heaven; and the forest glades
are as quiet as the churchyard, and with the dew I can wash the
fever from my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no longer."  And
I turned as if to open my garden gate, and immediately I saw upon
the left a scene far different, but which yet the power of dreams
had reconciled into harmony with the other.  The scene was an
Oriental one, and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in
the morning.  And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon
the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city--an image or
faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of
Jerusalem.  And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone and shaded by
Judean palms, there sat a woman, and I looked, and it was--Ann!  She
fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and I said to her at length:  "So,
then, I have found you at last."  I waited, but she answered me not
a word.  Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet again
how different!  Seventeen years ago, when the lamp-light fell upon
her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to
me were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears:  the
tears were now wiped away; she seemed more beautiful than she was at
that time, but in all other points the same, and not older.  Her
looks were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I
now gazed upon her with some awe; but suddenly her countenance grew
dim, and turning to the mountains I perceived vapours rolling
between us.  In a moment all had vanished, thick darkness came on,
and in the twinkling of an eye I was far away from mountains, and by
lamplight in Oxford Street, walking again with Ann--just as we
walked seventeen years before, when we were both children.

As a final specimen, I cite one of a different character, from 1820.

The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams--
a music of preparation and of awakening suspense, a music like the
opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like THAT, gave the
feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the
tread of innumerable armies.  The morning was come of a mighty day--
a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering
some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity.
Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not how--by some
beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony, was
conducting, was evolving like a great drama or piece of music, with
which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to
its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue.  I, as is
usual in dreams (where of necessity we make ourselves central to
every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide
it.  I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it, and yet
again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon
me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.  "Deeper than ever
plummet sounded," I lay inactive.  Then like a chorus the passion
deepened.  Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause
than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed.
Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of
innumerable fugitives--I knew not whether from the good cause or the
bad, darkness and lights, tempest and human faces, and at last, with
the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that
were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed--and
clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then--everlasting
farewells!  And with a sigh, such as the caves of Hell sighed when
the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound
was reverberated--everlasting farewells!  And again and yet again
reverberated--everlasting farewells!

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud--"I will sleep no more."

But I am now called upon to wind up a narrative which has already
extended to an unreasonable length.  Within more spacious limits the
materials which I have used might have been better unfolded, and
much which I have not used might have been added with effect.
Perhaps, however, enough has been given.  It now remains that I
should say something of the way in which this conflict of horrors
was finally brought to a crisis.  The reader is already aware (from
a passage near the beginning of the introduction to the first part)
that the Opium-eater has, in some way or other, "unwound almost to
its final links the accursed chain which bound him."  By what means?
To have narrated this according to the original intention would have
far exceeded the space which can now be allowed.  It is fortunate,
as such a cogent reason exists for abridging it, that I should, on a
maturer view of the case, have been exceedingly unwilling to injure,
by any such unaffecting details, the impression of the history
itself, as an appeal to the prudence and the conscience of the yet
unconfirmed opium-eater--or even (though a very inferior
consideration) to injure its effect as a composition.  The interest
of the judicious reader will not attach itself chiefly to the
subject of the fascinating spells, but to the fascinating power.
Not the Opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale,
and the legitimate centre on which the interest revolves.  The
object was to display the marvellous agency of opium, whether for
pleasure or for pain:  if that is done, the action of the piece has
closed.

However, as some people, in spite of all laws to the contrary, will
persist in asking what became of the Opium-eater, and in what state
he now is, I answer for him thus:  The reader is aware that opium
had long ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it was
solely by the tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it that
it kept its hold.  Yet, as other tortures, no less it may be
thought, attended the non-abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only
of evils was left; and THAT might as well have been adopted which,
however terrific in itself, held out a prospect of final restoration
to happiness.  This appears true; but good logic gave the author no
strength to act upon it.  However, a crisis arrived for the author's
life, and a crisis for other objects still dearer to him--and which
will always be far dearer to him than his life, even now that it is
again a happy one.  I saw that I must die if I continued the opium.
I determined, therefore, if that should be required, to die in
throwing it off.  How much I was at that time taking I cannot say,
for the opium which I used had been purchased for me by a friend,
who afterwards refused to let me pay him; so that I could not
ascertain even what quantity I had used within the year.  I
apprehend, however, that I took it very irregularly, and that I
varied from about fifty or sixty grains to 150 a day.  My first task
was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and as fast as I could to
twelve grains.

I triumphed.  But think not, reader, that therefore my sufferings
were ended, nor think of me as of one sitting in a DEJECTED state.
Think of me as one, even when four months had passed, still
agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered, and much
perhaps in the situation of him who has been racked, as I collect
the torments of that state from the affecting account of them left
by a most innocent sufferer {20} of the times of James I.  Meantime,
I derived no benefit from any medicine, except one prescribed to me
by an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence, viz., ammoniated tincture
of valerian.  Medical account, therefore, of my emancipation I have
not much to give, and even that little, as managed by a man so
ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend only to mislead.
At all events, it would be misplaced in this situation.  The moral
of the narrative is addressed to the opium-eater, and therefore of
necessity limited in its application.  If he is taught to fear and
tremble, enough has been effected.  But he may say that the issue of
my case is at least a proof that opium, after a seventeen years' use
and an eight years' abuse of its powers, may still be renounced, and
that HE may chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did,
or that with a stronger constitution than mine he may obtain the
same results with less.  This may be true.  I would not presume to
measure the efforts of other men by my own.  I heartily wish him
more energy.  I wish him the same success.  Nevertheless, I had
motives external to myself which he may unfortunately want, and
these supplied me with conscientious supports which mere personal
interests might fail to supply to a mind debilitated by opium.

Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to
die.  I think it probable; and during the whole period of
diminishing the opium I had the torments of a man passing out of one
mode of existence into another.  The issue was not death, but a sort
of physical regeneration; and I may add that ever since, at
intervals, I have had a restoration of more than youthful spirits,
though under the pressure of difficulties which in a less happy
state of mind I should have called misfortunes.

One memorial of my former condition still remains--my dreams are not
yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have
not wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing
off, but not all departed; my sleep is still tumultuous, and, like
the gates of Paradise to our first parents when looking back from
afar, it is still (in the tremendous line of Milton)


With dreadful faces throng'd, and fiery arms.



APPENDIX



From the "London Magazine" for December 1822.

The interest excited by the two papers bearing this title, in our
numbers for September and October 1821, will have kept our promise
of a Third Part fresh in the remembrance of our readers.  That we
are still unable to fulfil our engagement in its original meaning
will, we, are sure, be matter of regret to them as to ourselves,
especially when they have perused the following affecting narrative.
It was composed for the purpose of being appended to an edition of
the Confessions in a separate volume, which is already before the
public, and we have reprinted it entire, that our subscribers may be
in possession of the whole of this extraordinary history.


The proprietors of this little work having determined on reprinting
it, some explanation seems called for, to account for the non-
appearance of a third part promised in the London Magazine of
December last; and the more so because the proprietors, under whose
guarantee that promise was issued, might otherwise be implicated in
the blame--little or much--attached to its non-fulfilment.  This
blame, in mere justice, the author takes wholly upon himself.  What
may be the exact amount of the guilt which he thus appropriates is a
very dark question to his own judgment, and not much illuminated by
any of the masters in casuistry whom he has consulted on the
occasion.  On the one hand it seems generally agreed that a promise
is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made;
for which reason it is that we see many persons break promises
without scruple that are made to a whole nation, who keep their
faith religiously in all private engagements, breaches of promise
towards the stronger party being committed at a man's own peril; on
the other hand, the only parties interested in the promises of an
author are his readers, and these it is a point of modesty in any
author to believe as few as possible--or perhaps only one, in which
case any promise imposes a sanctity of moral obligation which it is
shocking to think of.  Casuistry dismissed, however, the author
throws himself on the indulgent consideration of all who may
conceive themselves aggrieved by his delay, in the following account
of his own condition from the end of last year, when the engagement
was made, up nearly to the present time.  For any purpose of self-
excuse it might be sufficient to say that intolerable bodily
suffering had totally disabled him for almost any exertion of mind,
more especially for such as demands and presupposes a pleasurable
and genial state of feeling; but, as a case that may by possibility
contribute a trifle to the medical history of opium, in a further
stage of its action than can often have been brought under the
notice of professional men, he has judged that it might be
acceptable to some readers to have it described more at length.
Fiat experimentum in corpore vili is a just rule where there is any
reasonable presumption of benefit to arise on a large scale.  What
the benefit may be will admit of a doubt, but there can be none as
to the value of the body; for a more worthless body than his own the
author is free to confess cannot be.  It is his pride to believe
that it is the very ideal of a base, crazy, despicable human system,
that hardly ever could have been meant to be seaworthy for two days
under the ordinary storms and wear and tear of life; and indeed, if
that were the creditable way of disposing of human bodies, he must
own that he should almost be ashamed to bequeath his wretched
structure to any respectable dog.  But now to the case, which, for
the sake of avoiding the constant recurrence of a cumbersome
periphrasis, the author will take the liberty of giving in the first
person.


Those who have read the Confessions will have closed them with the
impression that I had wholly renounced the use of opium.  This
impression I meant to convey, and that for two reasons:  first,
because the very act of deliberately recording such a state of
suffering necessarily presumes in the recorder a power of surveying
his own case as a cool spectator, and a degree of spirits for
adequately describing it which it would be inconsistent to suppose
in any person speaking from the station of an actual sufferer;
secondly, because I, who had descended from so large a quantity as
8,000 drops to so small a one (comparatively speaking) as a quantity
ranging between 300 and 160 drops, might well suppose that the
victory was in effect achieved.  In suffering my readers, therefore,
to think of me as of a reformed opium-eater, I left no impression
but what I shared myself; and, as may be seen, even this impression
was left to be collected from the general tone of the conclusion,
and not from any specific words, which are in no instance at
variance with the literal truth.  In no long time after that paper
was written I became sensible that the effort which remained would
cost me far more energy than I had anticipated, and the necessity
for making it was more apparent every month.  In particular I became
aware of an increasing callousness or defect of sensibility in the
stomach, and this I imagined might imply a scirrhous state of that
organ, either formed or forming.  An eminent physician, to whose
kindness I was at that time deeply indebted, informed me that such a
termination of my case was not impossible, though likely to be
forestalled by a different termination in the event of my continuing
the use of opium.  Opium therefore I resolved wholly to abjure as
soon as I should find myself at liberty to bend my undivided
attention and energy to this purpose.  It was not, however, until
the 24th of June last that any tolerable concurrence of facilities
for such an attempt arrived.  On that day I began my experiment,
having previously settled in my own mind that I would not flinch,
but would "stand up to the scratch" under any possible "punishment."
I must premise that about 170 or 180 drops had been my ordinary
allowance for many months; occasionally I had run up as high as 500,
and once nearly to 700; in repeated preludes to my final experiment
I had also gone as low as 100 drops; but had found it impossible to
stand it beyond the fourth day--which, by the way, I have always
found more difficult to get over than any of the preceding three.  I
went off under easy sail--130 drops a day for three days; on the
fourth I plunged at once to 80.  The misery which I now suffered
"took the conceit" out of me at once, and for about a month I
continued off and on about this mark; then I sunk to 60, and the
next day to--none at all.  This was the first day for nearly ten
years that I had existed without opium.  I persevered in my
abstinence for ninety hours; i.e., upwards of half a week.  Then I
took--ask me not how much; say, ye severest, what would ye have
done?  Then I abstained again--then took about 25 drops then
abstained; and so on.

Meantime the symptoms which attended my case for the first six weeks
of my experiment were these:  enormous irritability and excitement
of the whole system; the stomach in particular restored to a full
feeling of vitality and sensibility, but often in great pain;
unceasing restlessness night and day; sleep--I scarcely knew what it
was; three hours out of the twenty-four was the utmost I had, and
that so agitated and shallow that I heard every sound that was near
me.  Lower jaw constantly swelling, mouth ulcerated, and many other
distressing symptoms that would be tedious to repeat; amongst which,
however, I must mention one, because it had never failed to
accompany any attempt to renounce opium--viz., violent sternutation.
This now became exceedingly troublesome, sometimes lasting for two
hours at once, and recurring at least twice or three times a day.  I
was not much surprised at this on recollecting what I had somewhere
heard or read, that the membrane which lines the nostrils is a
prolongation of that which lines the stomach; whence, I believe, are
explained the inflammatory appearances about the nostrils of dram
drinkers.  The sudden restoration of its original sensibility to the
stomach expressed itself, I suppose, in this way.  It is remarkable
also that during the whole period of years through which I had taken
opium I had never once caught cold (as the phrase is), nor even the
slightest cough.  But now a violent cold attacked me, and a cough
soon after.  In an unfinished fragment of a letter begun about this
time to--I find these words:  "You ask me to write the--Do you know
Beaumont and Fletcher's play of "Thierry and Theodore"?  There you
will see my case as to sleep; nor is it much of an exaggeration in
other features.  I protest to you that I have a greater influx of
thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign
of opium.  It seems as though all the thoughts which had been frozen
up for a decade of years by opium had now, according to the old
fable, been thawed at once--such a multitude stream in upon me from
all quarters.  Yet such is my impatience and hideous irritability
that for one which I detain and write down fifty escape me:  in
spite of my weariness from suffering and want of sleep, I cannot
stand still or sit for two minutes together.  'I nunc, et versus
tecum meditare canoros.'"

At this stage of my experiment I sent to a neighbouring surgeon,
requesting that he would come over to see me.  In the evening he
came; and after briefly stating the case to him, I asked this
question; Whether he did not think that the opium might have acted
as a stimulus to the digestive organs, and that the present state of
suffering in the stomach, which manifestly was the cause of the
inability to sleep, might arise from indigestion?  His answer was;
No; on the contrary, he thought that the suffering was caused by
digestion itself, which should naturally go on below the
consciousness, but which from the unnatural state of the stomach,
vitiated by so long a use of opium, was become distinctly
perceptible.  This opinion was plausible; and the unintermitting
nature of the suffering disposes me to think that it was true, for
if it had been any mere IRREGULAR affection of the stomach, it
should naturally have intermitted occasionally, and constantly
fluctuated as to degree.  The intention of nature, as manifested in
the healthy state, obviously is to withdraw from our notice all the
vital motions, such as the circulation of the blood, the expansion
and contraction of the lungs, the peristaltic action of the stomach,
&c., and opium, it seems, is able in this, as in other instances, to
counteract her purposes.  By the advice of the surgeon I tried
BITTERS.  For a short time these greatly mitigated the feelings
under which I laboured, but about the forty-second day of the
experiment the symptoms already noticed began to retire, and new
ones to arise of a different and far more tormenting class; under
these, but with a few intervals of remission, I have since continued
to suffer.  But I dismiss them undescribed for two reasons:  first,
because the mind revolts from retracing circumstantially any
sufferings from which it is removed by too short or by no interval.
To do this with minuteness enough to make the review of any use
would be indeed infandum renovare dolorem, and possibly without a
sufficient motive; for secondly, I doubt whether this latter state
be anyway referable to opium--positively considered, or even
negatively; that is, whether it is to be numbered amongst the last
evils from the direct action of opium, or even amongst the earliest
evils consequent upon a WANT of opium in a system long deranged by
its use.  Certainly one part of the symptoms might be accounted for
from the time of year (August), for though the summer was not a hot
one, yet in any case the sum of all the heat FUNDED (if one may say
so) during the previous months, added to the existing heat of that
month, naturally renders August in its better half the hottest part
of the year; and it so happened that--the excessive perspiration
which even at Christmas attends any great reduction in the daily
quantum of opium--and which in July was so violent as to oblige me
to use a bath five or six times a day--had about the setting-in of
the hottest season wholly retired, on which account any bad effect
of the heat might be the more unmitigated.  Another symptom--viz.,
what in my ignorance I call internal rheumatism (sometimes affecting
the shoulders, &c., but more often appearing to be seated in the
stomach)--seemed again less probably attributable to the opium, or
the want of opium, than to the dampness of the house {21} which I
inhabit, which had about this time attained its maximum, July having
been, as usual, a month of incessant rain in our most rainy part of
England.

Under these reasons for doubting whether opium had any connexion
with the latter stage of my bodily wretchedness--except, indeed, as
an occasional cause, as having left the body weaker and more crazy,
and thus predisposed to any mal-influence whatever--I willingly
spare my reader all description of it; let it perish to him, and
would that I could as easily say let it perish to my own
remembrances, that any future hours of tranquillity may not be
disturbed by too vivid an ideal of possible human misery!

So much for the sequel of my experiment.  As to the former stage, in
which probably lies the experiment and its application to other
cases, I must request my reader not to forget the reasons for which
I have recorded it.  These were two:  First, a belief that I might
add some trifle to the history of opium as a medical agent.  In this
I am aware that I have not at all fulfilled my own intentions, in
consequence of the torpor of mind, pain of body, and extreme disgust
to the subject which besieged me whilst writing that part of my
paper; which part being immediately sent off to the press (distant
about five degrees of latitude), cannot be corrected or improved.
But from this account, rambling as it may be, it is evident that
thus much of benefit may arise to the persons most interested in
such a history of opium, viz., to opium-eaters in general, that it
establishes, for their consolation and encouragement, the fact that
opium may be renounced, and without greater sufferings than an
ordinary resolution may support, and by a pretty rapid course {22}
of descent.

To communicate this result of my experiment was my foremost purpose.
Secondly, as a purpose collateral to this, I wished to explain how
it had become impossible for me to compose a Third Part in time to
accompany this republication; for during the time of this experiment
the proof-sheets of this reprint were sent to me from London, and
such was my inability to expand or to improve them, that I could not
even bear to read them over with attention enough to notice the
press errors or to correct any verbal inaccuracies.  These were my
reasons for troubling my reader with any record, long or short, of
experiments relating to so truly base a subject as my own body; and
I am earnest with the reader that he will not forget them, or so far
misapprehend me as to believe it possible that I would condescend to
so rascally a subject for its own sake, or indeed for any less
object than that of general benefit to others.  Such an animal as
the self-observing valetudinarian I know there is; I have met him
myself occasionally, and I know that he is the worst imaginable
HEAUTONTIMOROUMENOS; aggravating and sustaining, by calling into
distinct consciousness, every symptom that would else perhaps, under
a different direction given to the thoughts, become evanescent.  But
as to myself, so profound is my contempt for this undignified and
selfish habit, that I could as little condescend to it as I could to
spend my time in watching a poor servant girl, to whom at this
moment I hear some lad or other making love at the back of my house.
Is it for a Transcendental Philosopher to feel any curiosity on such
an occasion?  Or can I, whose life is worth only eight and a half
years' purchase, be supposed to have leisure for such trivial
employments?  However, to put this out of question, I shall say one
thing, which will perhaps shock some readers, but I am sure it ought
not to do so, considering the motives on which I say it.  No man, I
suppose, employs much of his time on the phenomena of his own body
without some regard for it; whereas the reader sees that, so far
from looking upon mine with any complacency or regard, I hate it,
and make it the object of my bitter ridicule and contempt; and I
should not be displeased to know that the last indignities which the
law inflicts upon the bodies of the worst malefactors might
hereafter fall upon it.  And, in testification of my sincerity in
saying this, I shall make the following offer.  Like other men, I
have particular fancies about the place of my burial; having lived
chiefly in a mountainous region, I rather cleave to the conceit,
that a grave in a green churchyard amongst the ancient and solitary
hills will be a sublimer and more tranquil place of repose for a
philosopher than any in the hideous Golgothas of London.  Yet if the
gentlemen of Surgeons' Hall think that any benefit can redound to
their science from inspecting the appearances in the body of an
opium-eater, let them speak but a word, and I will take care that
mine shall be legally secured to them--i.e., as soon as I have done
with it myself.  Let them not hesitate to express their wishes upon
any scruples of false delicacy and consideration for my feelings; I
assure them they will do me too much honour by "demonstrating" on
such a crazy body as mine, and it will give me pleasure to
anticipate this posthumous revenge and insult inflicted upon that
which has caused me so much suffering in this life.  Such bequests
are not common; reversionary benefits contingent upon the death of
the testator are indeed dangerous to announce in many cases:  of
this we have a remarkable instance in the habits of a Roman prince,
who used, upon any notification made to him by rich persons that
they had left him a handsome estate in their wills, to express his
entire satisfaction at such arrangements and his gracious acceptance
of those loyal legacies; but then, if the testators neglected to
give him immediate possession of the property, if they traitorously
"persisted in living" (si vivere perseverarent, as Suetonius
expresses it), he was highly provoked, and took his measures
accordingly.  In those times, and from one of the worst of the
Caesars, we might expect such conduct; but I am sure that from
English surgeons at this day I need look for no expressions of
impatience, or of any other feelings but such as are answerable to
that pure love of science and all its interests which induces me to
make such an offer.

Sept 30, 1822




Footnotes:

{1}  "Not yet RECORDED," I say; for there is one celebrated man of
the present day, who, if all be true which is reported of him, has
greatly exceeded me in quantity.

{2}  A third exception might perhaps have been added; and my reason
for not adding that exception is chiefly because it was only in his
juvenile efforts that the writer whom I allude to expressly
addressed hints to philosophical themes; his riper powers having
been all dedicated (on very excusable and very intelligible grounds,
under the present direction of the popular mind in England) to
criticism and the Fine Arts.  This reason apart, however, I doubt
whether he is not rather to be considered an acute thinker than a
subtle one.  It is, besides, a great drawback on his mastery over
philosophical subjects that he has obviously not had the advantage
of a regular scholastic education:  he has not read Plato in his
youth (which most likely was only his misfortune), but neither has
he read Kant in his manhood (which is his fault).

{3}  I disclaim any allusion to EXISTING professors, of whom indeed
I know only one.

{4}  To this same Jew, by the way, some eighteen months afterwards,
I applied again on the same business; and, dating at that time from
a respectable college, I was fortunate enough to gain his serious
attention to my proposals.  My necessities had not arisen from any
extravagance or youthful levities (these my habits and the nature of
my pleasures raised me far above), but simply from the vindictive
malice of my guardian, who, when he found himself no longer able to
prevent me from going to the university, had, as a parting token of
his good nature, refused to sign an order for granting me a shilling
beyond the allowance made to me at school--viz., 100 pounds per
annum.  Upon this sum it was in my time barely possible to have
lived in college, and not possible to a man who, though above the
paltry affectation of ostentatious disregard for money, and without
any expensive tastes, confided nevertheless rather too much in
servants, and did not delight in the petty details of minute
economy.  I soon, therefore, became embarrassed, and at length,
after a most voluminous negotiation with the Jew (some parts of
which, if I had leisure to rehearse them, would greatly amuse my
readers), I was put in possession of the sum I asked for, on the
"regular" terms of paying the Jew seventeen and a half per cent. by
way of annuity on all the money furnished; Israel, on his part,
graciously resuming no more than about ninety guineas of the said
money, on account of an attorney's bill (for what services, to whom
rendered, and when, whether at the siege of Jerusalem, at the
building of the second Temple, or on some earlier occasion, I have
not yet been able to discover).  How many perches this bill measured
I really forget; but I still keep it in a cabinet of natural
curiosities, and some time or other I believe I shall present it to
the British Museum.

{5}  The Bristol mail is the best appointed in the Kingdom, owing to
the double advantages of an unusually good road and of an extra sum
for the expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants.

{6}  It will be objected that many men, of the highest rank and
wealth, have in our own day, as well as throughout our history, been
amongst the foremost in courting danger in battle.  True; but this
is not the case supposed; long familiarity with power has to them
deadened its effect and its attractions.

{7}  [Greek text]

{8}  [Greek text].  EURIP.  Orest.

{9}  [Greek text]

{10}  [Greek text].  The scholar will know that throughout this
passage I refer to the early scenes of the Orestes; one of the most
beautiful exhibitions of the domestic affections which even the
dramas of Euripides can furnish.  To the English reader it may be
necessary to say that the situation at the opening of the drama is
that of a brother attended only by his sister during the demoniacal
possession of a suffering conscience (or, in the mythology of the
play, haunted by the Furies), and in circumstances of immediate
danger from enemies, and of desertion or cold regard from nominal
friends.

{11}  EVANESCED:  this way of going off the stage of life appears to
have been well known in the 17th century, but at that time to have
been considered a peculiar privilege of blood-royal, and by no means
to be allowed to druggists.  For about the year 1686 a poet of
rather ominous name (and who, by-the-bye, did ample justice to his
name), viz., Mr. FLAT-MAN, in speaking of the death of Charles II.
expresses his surprise that any prince should commit so absurd an
act as dying, because, says he,

"Kings should disdain to die, and only DISAPPEAR."

They should ABSCOND, that is, into the other world.

{12}  Of this, however, the learned appear latterly to have doubted;
for in a pirated edition of Buchan's Domestic Medicine, which I once
saw in the hands of a farmer's wife, who was studying it for the
benefit of her health, the Doctor was made to say--"Be particularly
careful never to take above five-and-twenty OUNCES of laudanum at
once;" the true reading being probably five-and-twenty DROPS, which
are held equal to about one grain of crude opium.

{13}  Amongst the great herd of travellers, &c., who show
sufficiently by their stupidity that they never held any intercourse
with opium, I must caution my readers specially against the
brilliant author of Anastasius.  This gentleman, whose wit would
lead one to presume him an opium-eater, has made it impossible to
consider him in that character, from the grievous misrepresentation
which he gives of its effects at pp. 215-17 of vol. i.  Upon
consideration it must appear such to the author himself, for,
waiving the errors I have insisted on in the text, which (and
others) are adopted in the fullest manner, he will himself admit
that an old gentleman "with a snow-white beard," who eats "ample
doses of opium," and is yet able to deliver what is meant and
received as very weighty counsel on the bad effects of that
practice, is but an indifferent evidence that opium either kills
people prematurely or sends them into a madhouse.  But for my part,
I see into this old gentleman and his motives:  the fact is, he was
enamoured of "the little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug"
which Anastasius carried about him; and no way of obtaining it so
safe and so feasible occurred as that of frightening its owner out
of his wits (which, by the bye, are none of the strongest).  This
commentary throws a new light upon the case, and greatly improves it
as a story; for the old gentleman's speech, considered as a lecture
on pharmacy, is highly absurd; but considered as a hoax on
Anastasius, it reads excellently.

{14}  I have not the book at this moment to consult; but I think the
passage begins--"And even that tavern music, which makes one man
merry, another mad, in me strikes a deep fit of devotion," &c.

{15}  A handsome newsroom, of which I was very politely made free in
passing through Manchester by several gentlemen of that place, is
called, I think, The Porch; whence I, who am a stranger in
Manchester, inferred that the subscribers meant to profess
themselves followers of Zeno.  But I have been since assured that
this is a mistake.

{16}  I here reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equivalent to
one grain of opium, which, I believe, is the common estimate.
However, as both may be considered variable quantities (the crude
opium varying much in strength, and the tincture still more), I
suppose that no infinitesimal accuracy can be had in such a
calculation.  Teaspoons vary as much in size as opium in strength.
Small ones hold about 100 drops; so that 8,000 drops are about
eighty times a teaspoonful.  The reader sees how much I kept within
Dr. Buchan's indulgent allowance.

{17}  This, however, is not a necessary conclusion; the varieties of
effect produced by opium on different constitutions are infinite.  A
London magistrate (Harriott's Struggles through Life, vol. iii. p.
391, third edition) has recorded that, on the first occasion of his
trying laudanum for the gout he took FORTY drops, the next night
SIXTY, and on the fifth night EIGHTY, without any effect whatever;
and this at an advanced age.  I have an anecdote from a country
surgeon, however, which sinks Mr. Harriott's case into a trifle; and
in my projected medical treatise on opium, which I will publish
provided the College of Surgeons will pay me for enlightening their
benighted understandings upon this subject, I will relate it; but it
is far too good a story to be published gratis.

{18}  See the common accounts in any Eastern traveller or voyager of
the frantic excesses committed by Malays who have taken opium, or
are reduced to desperation by ill-luck at gambling.

{19}  The reader must remember what I here mean by THINKING, because
else this would be a very presumptuous expression.  England, of
late, has been rich to excess in fine thinkers, in the departments
of creative and combining thought; but there is a sad dearth of
masculine thinkers in any analytic path.  A Scotchman of eminent
name has lately told us that he is obliged to quit even mathematics
for want of encouragement.

{20}  William Lithgow.  His book (Travels, &,c.) is ill and
pedantically written; but the account of his own sufferings on the
rack at Malaga is overpoweringly affecting.

{21}  In saying this I mean no disrespect to the individual house,
as the reader will understand when I tell him that, with the
exception of one or two princely mansions, and some few inferior
ones that have been coated with Roman cement, I am not acquainted
with any house in this mountainous district which is wholly
waterproof.  The architecture of books, I flatter myself, is
conducted on just principles in this country; but for any other
architecture, it is in a barbarous state, and what is worse, in a
retrograde state.

{22}  On which last notice I would remark that mine was TOO rapid,
and the suffering therefore needlessly aggravated; or rather,
perhaps, it was not sufficiently continuous and equably graduated.
But that the reader may judge for himself, and above all that the
Opium-eater, who is preparing to retire from business, may have
every sort of information before him, I subjoin my diary:-

First Week                   Second Week
       Drops of Laud.           Drops of Laud.
Mond. June 24 ... 130    Mond. July  1 ...  80
           25 ... 140                2 ...  80
           26 ... 130                3 ...  90
           27 ...  80                4 ... 100
           28 ...  80                5 ...  80
           29 ...  80                6 ...  80
           30 ...  80                7 ...  80
Third Week                   Fourth Week
Mond. July  8 ... 300    Mond. July 15 ...  76
            9 ...  50               16 ...  73.5
           10 }                     17 ...  73.5
           11 } Hiatus in           18 ...  70
           12 } MS.                 19 ... 240
           13 }                     20 ...  80
           14 ...  76               21 ... 350
Fifth Week
Mond. July 22 ...  60
           23 ... none.
           24 ... none.
           25 ... none.
           26 ... 200
           27 ... none.

What mean these abrupt relapses, the reader will ask perhaps, to
such numbers as 300, 350, &c.?  The IMPULSE to these relapses was
mere infirmity of purpose; the MOTIVE, where any motive blended with
this impulse, was either the principle, of "reculer pour mieux
sauter;" (for under the torpor of a large dose, which lasted for a
day or two, a less quantity satisfied the stomach, which on
awakening found itself partly accustomed to this new ration); or
else it was this principle--that of sufferings otherwise equal,
those will be borne best which meet with a mood of anger.  Now,
whenever I ascended to my large dose I was furiously incensed on the
following day, and could then have borne anything.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater