Group 42-Sells Out! - The Information Archive/Group 42 Sells Out (Group 42) (1996).iso/drugs/opiates/plesopim.txt

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Confessions of an English Opium Eater
by Thomas de Quincey

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 bason 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,{1} 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 the 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 [pharmakon
nepenthez] 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 ecstasies 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 /Il 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 I also grant: for in my time, East-India 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.{2}  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 man 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 periculo/, 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, of 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 judgment, 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 by-stander.  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 heard originally just and good.  True it is, that even wine, up to a
certain point, and with certain men, rather tends to exalt and to steady the
intellect: I myself, who have never been a great wine-drinker, used to find
that half a dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the faculties --
brightened and intensified the consciousness -- and gave to the mind a
feeling of being "ponderibus librata suis:" and certainly it is most absurdly
said, in popular language, of any man, that he is /disguised/ in liquor: for,
on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety; and it is when they are
drinking (as some old gentleman says in Athenaeus), that men [eantonz
emfanixondin oitinez eidin]. -- 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 volatilize 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{3} 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 agreed 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 7000 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, connected with certain diagnostics.  Some people have maintained,
in my hearing, that they had been drunk on 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 t 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 stupify the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by way of treating
the question illustratively, rather than argumentively) 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 had a right
occasionally to relaxations as well as the other people: these, however, I
allowed myself but seldom.

The late Duke of Norfolk 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 no
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 clangorous 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/{4} 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 re-action 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 nd 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 auto-biographers 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 to 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 on 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 tranquility.  And taken generally, I must say, that, in
this point at least, the poor are far more philosophic than the rich -- that
they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as
irremediably 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 a compliance with the master key.
Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too
happy to observe the motion of time.  And sometimes in my attempts to steer
homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and
seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all
the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly
upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such
sphynx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive,
baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-
coachmen.  I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first
discoverer of some of these /terrae incognitae/, and doubted, whether they
had yet been aid down in the modern charts of London.  For all this,
however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face
tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came
back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities moral or
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 Liverpool, at about the same distance, that I have sate, from
sun-set to sun-rise, 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 readers 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 Liverpool
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 tranquility 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 and 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 unredress'd, and insults unavenged;

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

-----

{1} /Evanesced:/ -- this way of going off the stage of life appears to have
been well known in the 17th century, but at the 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.

{2} 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.

{3} 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 especially 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 misrepresenta-
tion 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.

{4} 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.