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shop in Oxford Street, "near the stately Pantheon," purchased a vial of the drug, and carried it to his lodgings. The effect of the first dose was something magical; not only was the pain removed, but it acted upon him as an intellectual stimulant and exhilarant. From that day to his death-fiftyfive years there were probably few days in which he did not use opium in some form; at first habitually in moderate doses; only on Saturdays he was wont to shut himself up for what he calls an "opium debauch." This appears to have been his condition up to 1812. "It was then," he writes, "that I became a regular and confirmed (no longer an intermitting) opium-eater." From this time the quantity consumed grew larger and larger until it rose to 320 grains of solid opium, or 8,000 drops of laudanum a day-that is, to about seven wineglasses. Not long before his marriage, in 1816, he reduced the quantity by seven-eighths-taking for a year or more only 1,000 drops of laudanum instead of 8,000 a day. "That was," he says, "a year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers) set, as it were, and insulated in the gloomy umbrage of opium." But the reformation was brief; during the following two years he not only resumed his former rate of consumption, but increased it to sometimes 12,000 drops a day.

He had long meditated a great philosophical work, to be entitled De Emendatione Intellectus, but the opium habit had rendered him incapable of any continuous use of his intellectual powers, and the idea was tacitly abandoned. At this time he happened to receive a copy of Ricardo's Principles of

was

Political Economy. "The author," he said, the first man who shot light into what had hitherto been a dark chaos of materials." He wrote, or dictated to his wife gentle thoughts which grew out of his reading; and in time the manuscript for a book to be called Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political Economy was completed all but a few pages. Arrangements had been made for printing it; but when a thing must be done, De Quincey found himself unable to do it; the arrangements were countermanded, and the work was left unfinished.

Early in 1819 De Quincey found himself in great pecuniary straits. This seems to have enabled him partially to shake off the fetters of opium, and to do something. He gladly accepted the offer of the editorship of the Westmoreland Gazette, a journal which had been set up by some gentlemen who called themselves "Friends of the Constitution," to oppose the "infamous levelling doctrines" of Mr. Brougham and the Whigs. The salary was to be three guineas a week; but as the paper was published at Kendal, some leagues from his home, De Quincey acceded to an arrangement by which two guineas a week was to be paid to a sub-editor on the spot, he himself receiving only one guinea. His career as editor was not a very successful one, and lasted only about a year. He had, however, made some kind of arrangement to write for Blackwood and The Quarterly Review-engagements which would bring him £180 a year; at least so he wrote to his wealthy uncle, who had returned to India, concluding with a request to be allowed

to draw upon him for £500, "say £150 now, and the other £350 in six or eight months hence." It was his purpose, he added, to remove to London, and resume his training for the profession of the law. But his destiny was to shape itself quite otherwise.

The leading metropolitan magazine was then The London Magazine, which had a brilliant corps of contributors, among whom were Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, Henry Francis Cary, and "Barry Cornwall." The booksellers, Taylor and Hessey, who were the publishers, were also the nominal editors; but for assistant editor there was a young man of twenty-three, named Thomas Hood. In this magazine for September, 1821, appeared an article of twenty pages, entitled Confessions of an Opium-eater, being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar; to which was appended an editorial note stating that "the remainder of this very interesting article will be given in the next number." The second part of the Confessions appeared in October. These papers excited no little attention, and a continuation of them was strongly urged. This was promised by the author; but the matter was never furnished, and in September, 1822, the two parts of the Confessions were published in a small volume, with an apology from the publishers for the failure to supply the continuation. Among the most striking passages in the Confessions are those in which De Quincey describes his later dreams while under the influence of opium. Two of these may be taken as exemplars of many:

DREAMS OF THE ORIENT.

Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race it would 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 in the way that he is affected by the ancient monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Hindostan, etc. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, history, modes of faith, etc., 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 world most swarming with human life; the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also, into which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast gives 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 by the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. 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 horrors with which these dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feelings of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, and reptiles, all trees and

plants, usages and appearances, that are to be found in all tropical regions, and assembled them in China or Hindostan. 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 paroquets, 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 Brahma, through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Siva lay in 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 sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions amongst weeds and Nilotic mud. . . . 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 killing sense of Eternity and Infinity.

But

Into these dreams only it was, with one or two exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. 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 all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as always the case in my dreams) for centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with life. The abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions, and I stood loathing and fascinated. 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 stand

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