story of the little girl, the attorney, and the desolate house, is rather a meagre affair, from which the writer brings himself off not very happily. He 'generally contrived to lounge into the attorney's apartment during his breakfast, and with an air of as much indifference as he could assume, took such fragments as the attorney left.' And he does the man of law the justice to say, that, whatever may have been his professional practice, towards himself he was obliging, and, to the extent of his power, generous.

After some time spent in this place of hard and cold lodging by night, and in rambling about the streets during the day, without employment, or other object than the gratification of an idle curiosity and the finding of sufficient food to be not quite starved to death upon, he at length met with an acquaintance, was reclaimed to the regular course, and soon found himself at Eton college, by the side of a good breakfast, in company with a friend. After so long an abstinence, a comfortable breakfast should seem to be the signal for cheerfulness and hearty feeding, but his organs had contracted an inveterate habit of starvation, and seemed to have lost the power of appetite; and the having a good meal within his reach, seemed to be hardly a less evil now, than the want of it had been before. His organs, however, gradually recovered their tone, and he proceeded to the university without further adventures or misfortunes, but with an injured constitution, and many unpleasant recollections. The rest of the book is occupied with the relation of the effects of taking opium.

Being at London for the first time after his entrance at college, at the suggestion of an acquaintance, he took a quantity of opium, which put him into an ecstacy. Thereafter-as the Duke of used to say, 'Next friday, by the blessing of Heaven, I purpose to be drunk,'-he was accustomed to fix beforehand how often he would commit an excess in opium. He gives a dissertation upon the effects of opium, and maintains, that the exhilaration produced by it, is not at all like intoxication by brandy. He used to go to the opera in a state of exhilaration from opium, and maintains, that he could enjoy the music much more exquisitely by the help of this excitement; and accounts for this by saying, that,

'Opium, by increasing the activity of the mind, 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. A chorus of elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life, not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if 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.'

In this state of exhilaration, he could find excellent matter of delight in the conversation of the people about the market, and in the streets, on saturday night, when they were receiving their wages, and making their plans of amusement for sunday.

The most remarkable effect of this drug was, to enable him to study with good success the German metaphysics, in Kant, Fitche, Schelling, and others.

But at length he began to suffer in bodily health, and to be oppressed with melancholy. His remedy was to diminish the quantity of his doses. When he reduced it to one eighth part of what he had usually taken, he says, 'instantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy, which rested upon my brain, like those black vapors that I have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, drew off in one day; 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. My brain performed its functions as healthily as ever before; I read Kant again, and again I understood him, or fancied

that I did.'

He was at this time residing in a cottage among the mountains; where one day a Malay, in an Asiatic dress, entered his mansion. He describes the group, of which this visitor made a part, as it presented itself to him in the kitchen, when he came down from his study at the summons of his housekeeper.

'In a cottage kitchen, but panneled 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 trowsers of dingy white, relieved upon the dark pannel

ing; 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 figure could not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of the girl, 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 neighboring cottage, who had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head, and gazing upwards at the turban and fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand she caught at the dress of the young woman for protection.'

The Malay addressed him in Malay, which he repaid in Greek, neither understanding the other; whereupon, by the way of entertaining his visitor more intelligibly and agreeably, the host offered his guest a ball of opium, which the Malay accepted very cordially, and swallowed with great avidity, and thereupon departed on his journey in good spirits. The dose was so large, that he doubted whether he had poisoned his guest, or done him a kindness; but he congratulates himself on not hearing of the dead body of the Malay being afterwards found on the road side.

For a time he employed himself in his mountain cottage in reading the 'grand lamentations of Sampson Agonistes, the great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained,' Spinosa de Emendatione Humani Intellectûs, and Ricardo's Political Economy. But at length his habit of intemperance had made such inroads upon his constitution, that he says, 'My studies have now been long interrupted. I cannot read with any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance.' He describes himself as being in a state of intellectual torpor.

'But for misery and suffering, I might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state. I could seldom 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. 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 to attempt. He lies under a weight of

incubus and night mare; 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.'

He began to have the power, when awake, of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms.

'At night,' he says, '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 the times before Oedipus--before Tyre-before Memphis. 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 splendor. My dreams were accompanied by deep seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed 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. 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 unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millenium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.

In the early stages of my malady, the splendors of my dreams were chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces, as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of water. But subsequently the waters changed their character; from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. Now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself; 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 imagination was infinite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean.'

Then came the Malay, and with him a train of oriental imagery and mythology.

'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 Hindostan. I brought Egypt and her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkies, 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 Brama through all the forests of Asia; Vishna hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers, in the heart of eternal pyramids. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and 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 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; and I awoke and it was broad noon; and my children were standing at my bed side, come to shew me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. So awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and other unutterable monsters of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and infancy, that in the sudden revulsion of my mind, I wept and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.'

By diminishing his doses he gradually recovered the use of his faculties, and alleviated his nightly sufferings. But at the conclusion of his first edition, he says, '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

With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.'

This second edition has an appendix, which does not add at all to the literary merit of the production, but is rather a bulletin of the state of the patient's health, showing his constitution to be exhausted and shattered, and that, for the future, he had to expect only penance for his former habits.