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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
+Thomas De Quincey
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+Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
+
+by Thomas De Quincey
+
+January, 2000 [Etext #2040]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
+******This file should be named opium10.txt or opium10.zip******
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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.
+
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+
+
+
+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
+