CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER:

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
(φωναντα
συνετοισι): “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 midnight; 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 aërial 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
étourderie 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 οι
πολλοι. 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 various degrees of intensity; but as bitter, perhaps, as ever any
human being can have suffered who has survived it. I 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 my 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 matériel, 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 reäscent 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 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, I
prepared to go down to Eton. Nearly £3 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 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 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 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 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
moonlight 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 was swallowed 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
φαρμακον 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 Athenæus), that men
εαυτους
εμφανιζουσιν
οιτινες
εισιν—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
diviner 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 terræ incognitæ, 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
Hekatómpylos, 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 postulate 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 à 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 Eudæmonist; 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
(νυχθημερον); 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 à parte ante and à 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 acmé, 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
hyæna, 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 à 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 Œdipus 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 aërial 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
(cæteris 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 lamplight 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 Cæsars, 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 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}
Φιλον υπνη
θελyητρον
επικουρον
νοσον.

{8} ηδυ
δουλευμα. EURIP. Orest.

{9}
αναξανδρων
’Αyαμεμνων.

{10}
ομμα θεισ’
ειτω πεπλων. 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.