that injured his health.  The first instalment of his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” appeared in the “London Magazine” for September 1821.  It attracted universal attention both by its subject-matter and style.  De Quincey settled in Edinburgh, where most of his literary work was done, and where he died, on December 8, 1859.  His collected works, edited by Professor Masson, fill fourteen volumes.  After he had passed his seventieth year, De Quincey revised and extended his “Confessions,” but in their magazine form, from which this epitome is made, they have much greater freshness and power than in their later elaboration.  Many popular editions are now published.

I.—­The Descending Pathway

I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life, and I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive.  That must be my apology for breaking through the delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.

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 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.

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 acquaintances, 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.  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.

The calamities of my novitiate in London, when, as a runaway from school, I made acquaintance with starvation and horror, 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.

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, 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.  One morning I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite.