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Was it gradually, tentatively, mistrustingly, as one goes down a shelving beach into a deepening sea, and with a knowledge from the first of the dangers lying on that path ; half- courting those dangers, in fact, whilst seeming to defy them? Or was it, secondly, in pure ignorance of such dangers, under the misleadings of mercenary fraud? since oftentimes lozenges, for the relief of pulmonary affections, found their efficacy upon the opium which they contain, upon this, and this only, though clamorously disavowing so suspicious an alliance : and under such treacherous dis- guises multitudes are seduced into a dependency which _ they had not foreseen upon a drug which they had not known ; not known even by name or by sight : and thus the case is not rare—that the chain of abject. slavery is first detected when it has inextricably wound itself about the constitutional system. Thirdly, and lastly, was it [Yes, by passionate anticipation, I answer, before the question is finished]—was it on a sudden, overmastering impulse derived from bodily anguish? Loudly I repeat, Yes ;. loudly and indignantly—as in answer to a wilful calumny. Simply as an anodyne it was, under the mere coercion of pain the severest, that I first resorted to opium ; and precisely that same torment it is, or some 4 CONFESSIONS OF variety of that torment, which drives most people to make acquaintance with that same insidious remedy. Such was the fact ; such by accident. Meantime, without blame it might have been otherwise. df in early days I had fully understood the subtle powers lodged in this mighty drug (when judiciously regulated), (1) to tran- quillise all irritations of the nervous system; (2) to stimulate the capacities of enjoyment ; and (3) under any call for extraordinary exertion (such as all men meet at times), to sustain through twenty-four consecutive hours the else drooping animal energies+—most certainly, knowing or suspecting all this, I should have inaugurated my opium career in the character of one. seeking exsra -power and enjoyment, rather than of one shrinking from extra torment. And why not? If ¢hat argued any fault, is it not a fault that most of us commit every day with regard to alcohol? Are we entitled to use shat only as a medicine? Is wine unlawful, except as an anodyne? I hope not: else I shall be obliged to counterfeit and to plead some anomalous fic in my little finger; and thus gradually, as in any Ovidian metamorphosis, I, that am at present a truth-loving man, shall change by daily inches into a dissembler. No: the whole race of man proclaim it lawful to drink wine without pleading a medical certificate as a qualification. That same license extends itself therefore to the use of opium ; what a man may lawfully seek in wine surely he may lawfully find in opium ; and much more so in those many cases (of which mine happens to be one) where opium deranges the animal economy less by a great deal than an equivalent quantity of alcohol. Coleridge, therefore, was doubly in error when he allowed himself to aim most unfriendly blows at my supposed voluptuousness in the use of opium; in error as to a principle, and in error as to a fact. AQ letter of his, which I will hope that he did not design to have published, but which, however, has been published, points the attention of his correspondent to a. broad distinction separating my case as an opium-eater from his own: he, it seems, had fallen excusably (because unavoidably) into Sa eae MR A Ma Teh a AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 5 this habit of eating opium—as the one sole therapeutic resource available against his particular malady; but I, wretch that. I am, being so notoriously charmed by fairies against pain, must have resorted to opium in the abominable character of an adventurous voluptuary, angling in all streams for variety of pleasures. Coleridge is wrong to the whole extent of what was possible ; wrong in his fact, wrong in his doctrine; in his little fact, and his big doctrine. I did not do the thing which he charges upon me; and if I Aad done it, this would not convict me as a citizen of Sybaris or Daphne. There never was a distinction more groundless and visionary than that which it has pleased him to draw between my motives and his own; nor could Coleridge have possibly owed this mis-statement to any false information ; since no man surely, on a question of my own private experience, could have pretended to be better informed than myself. Or, if there really is such a person, perhaps he will not think it too much trouble to re-write these Confessions from first to last, correcting their innumerable faults ; and, as it happens that some parts of the unpublished sections for the present are missing, would he kindly restore them— brightening the colours that may have faded, rekindling the inspiration that may have drooped; filling up all those chasms which else are likely to remain as permanent disfigurations of my little work? Meantime the reader, who takes any interest in such a question, will find that I myself (upon such a theme not simply the best, but surely the sole authority) have, without a shadow of variation, always given a different account of the matter. Most truly I have told the reader, that not any search after pleasure, but mere extremity of pain from rheumatic toothache—this and nothing else it was that first drove me into the use of opium. Coleridge’s bodily affliction was simple rheumatism. Mine, which intermittingly raged for ten years, was rheumatism in the face combined with toothache. This I had inherited from my father ; or inherited (I should rather say) from my own desperate ignorance ; since a trifling dose of colocynth, or of any 6 CONFESSIONS OF similar medicine, taken three times a-week, would more certainly than opium have delivered me from that terrific curse.' In this ignorance, however, which misled me into making war upon toothache when ripened and manifesting itself in effects of pain, rather than upon its germs and gathering causes, I did but follow the rest of the world. To intercept the evil whilst yet in elementary stages of formation, was the true policy; whereas I in my blindness sought only for some mitigation to the evil when already formed, and past all reach of interception. In this stage of the suffering, formed and perfect, I was thrown passively upon chance advice, and therefore, by a natural consequence, upon opium—that being the one sole anodyne that is almost notoriously such, and which in that great function is universally appreciated. Coleridge, therefore, and myself, as regards our baptismal ‘initiation into the use of that mighty drug, occupy thé'very same position. We are embarked in the self-same boat; nor is it within the compass even of angelic hair-splitting, to show that the dark shadow thrown 1 * That terrific curse’? :—Two things blunt the general sense of horror, which would else connect itself with toothache—viz., first, its enormous diffusion; hardly a household in Europe being clear of it, each in turn having some one chamber intermittingly echoing the groans extorted by this cruel torture. There—viz., in its ubiquity— lies one cause of its slight valuation. A second cause is found in its immunity from danger. This latter ground of undervaluation is noticed in a saying ascribed (but on what authority I know not) to Sir Philip Sidney—viz., that supposing toothache liable in ever so small a proportion of its cases to a fatal issue, it would be generally ranked as the most dreadful amongst human maladies ; whereas the certainty that it will in no extremity lead to death, and the knowledge that in the very midst of its storms sudden changes may be looked for, bringing long halcyon calms, have an unfair effect in lowering the appreciation of this malady considered as a trial of fortitude and patience. No stronger expression of its intensity and scorching fierceness can be imagined than this fact—that, within my private knowledge, two persons, who had suffered alike under toothache and cancer, have pronounced the former to be, on the scale of torture, by many degrees the worse. In both, there are at times what surgeons call ‘lancinating’ pangs—keen, glancing, arrowy radiations of anguish ; and upon these the basis of comparison was rested—paroxysm against paroxysm—with the result that I have stated. Si tee dled i te AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 7 by our several treSpasses in this field, mine and his, had by so much as a pin’s point any assignable difference. Trespass against trespass (if any trespass there were)— shadow against shadow (if any shadow were really thrown by this trespass over the snowy disk of pure ascetic morality), in any case, that act in either of us would read into the same meaning, would count up as a debt into the same value, would measure as a delinquency into the same burden of responsibility. And vainly, indeed, does Coleridge attempt to differentiate two cases which ran into absolute identity, differing only as rheumatism differs from toothache. Amongst the admirers of Coleridge, I at all times stood in the foremost rank ; and the more was my astonishment at being summoned so often to witness his carelessness in the management of controversial questions, and his demoniac inaccuracy in the statement of facts. The more also was my sense of Coleridge’s wanton injustice in relation to myself individually. Cole- ridge’s gross mis-statement of facts, in regard to our several opium experiences, had its origin, sometimes in flighty reading, sometimes in partial and incoherent site: sometimes in subsequent forgetfulness ; and any one of these lax habits (it will occur to the reader) is a venial infirmity. Certainly it is; but surely mo¢ venial, when it is allowed to operate disadvantageously upon the character for self-control of a brother, who had never spoken of him but in the spirit of enthusiastic admiration ; of that admiration which his exquisite works so amply challenge. Imagine the case that I really had done something wrong, still it would have been ungenerous—me it would have saddened, I confess, to see Coleridge rushing forward with a public denunciation of my fault :—‘ Know all men by these presents, that I, S. T. C., @ noticeable man with large grey eyes,, am a licensed opium-eater, whereas this other man is a buccaneer, a pirate, a flibustier,” and can 1 See Wordsworth’s exquisite picture of S, T. C. and himself as occasional denizens in the Castle of Indolence. 2 This word—in common use, and so spelled as I spell it, amongst the grand old French and English buccaneers contemporary with our t ! i if 8 CONFESSIONS OF have none but a forged licence in his disreputable pocket. In the name of Virtue, arrest him!’ But the truth. is, that inaccuracy as to facts and citations from books was in Coleridge a mere necessity of nature. Not three days ago, in reading a short comment of the late Archdeacon Hare (Guesses at Truth) upon a bold speculation of Coleridge’s (utterly baseless) with respect to the machinery of Etonian Latin verses, I found my old feelings upon this subject refreshed by an instance that is irresistibly comic, since everything that Coleridge had relied upon as a citation from a book in support of his own hypothesis, turns out to be a pure fabrication of his own dreams ; though, doubtless (which indeed it is that constitutes the characteristic interest of the case), without a suspicion on his part of his own furious romancing. The archdeacon’s good- natured smile upon that Etonian case naturally reminded me of the case now before us, with regard to the history of our separate careers as opium-eaters. Upon which case I need say no more, as by this time the reader is aware that Coleridge’s entire statement upon that subject is perfect moonshine, and, like the sculptured imagery of the pendulous lamp in Christabel, All carvéd from the carver’s brain, This case, therefore, might now be counted on as disposed of; and what sport it could yield might reasonably be thought exhausted. Meantime, on consideration, another and much deeper oversight of Coleridge’s becomes ap- parent ; and as this connects itself with an aspect of the case that furnishes the foundation to the whole of these ensuing Confessions, it cannot altogether be neglected, Any attentive reader, after a few moments’ reflection, will perceive that, whatever may have been the. casual occasion of_mine or Coleridge’s opium-eating, this could not. have own admirable Dampier, at the close of the seventeenth century—has recently been revived in the journals of the United States, with a view to the special case of Cuba, but (for what reason I know not) is now written always as f/ibusters. Meantime, written in whatsoever way, it is understood to be a Franco-Spanish corruption of the English word Sreebooter. — 2 A ates AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER _ 9 been the permanent ground of opium-eating ; because neither rheumatism nor toothache is any abiding affection of.the system, Both are intermitting maladies, and not at all capable of accounting for a permanent habit of opium- eating. Some months are requisite to found “hat. Making allowance for constitutional differences, I should say that in. less than 120 days no habit of opium-eating could be formed strong enough to call for any extra- ordinary self~conquest in renouncing it, and even suddenly renouncing it. On Saturday you are an opium-eater, on Sunday no longer such. What then was it, after all, that made Coleridge a slave to opium, and a slave that could not break his chain? He fancies, in his headlong carelessness, that he has accounted for this habit and this slavery ; and in the meantime he has accounted for nothing at all about which any question has arisen. Rheumatism, he says, drove him to opium. Very well ; but with proper medical treatment the rheumatism would soon have ceased; or even, without medical treatment, under. the ordinary oscillations of natural causes, And when the pain ceased, then the opium should have ceased. Why did it not? Because Coleridge had come to taste the genial pleasure of opium ; and thus the very impeach- ment, which he fancied himself in some mysterious way to have evaded, recoils upon him in undiminished force. The rheumatic attack would have retired before the habit could have had time to form itself. Or.suppose that I -underrate the strength of the possible habit—this tells equally in my favour ; and Coleridge was not entitled to forget in my case a plea remembered in his own. It is really memorable in the annals of shuman-self-deceptions, that Coleridge could have held such language in the face of such facts. I, boasting not at all of my self-conquests, and owning no moral argument against the free use of opium, nevertheless on mere prudential motives break through the vassalage more than once, and by efforts which I have recorded as modes of transcendent suffering. Coleridge, professing to believe (without reason assigned) that opium-eating is criminal, and in some mysterious 10 CONFESSIONS OF sense more criminal than wine-drinking or porter-drinking, having, therefore, the strongest mora/ motive for abstain- ing from it, yet suffers himself to fall into a captivity to this same wicked opium, deadlier than was ever heard of, and under no coercion whatever that he has anywhere explained to us. A slave he was to this potent drug not less abject than Caliban to Prospero—his detested and yet despotic master. Like Caliban, he frets his very heart- strings against the rivets of his chain. Still, at intervals through the gloomy vigils of his prison, you hear muttered growls of impotent mutineering swelling upon the breeze : Trasque leonum Vincla recusantum recusantum, it is true, still refusing yet still accepting, protesting for ever against the fierce, overmastering curb- chain, yet for ever submitting to receive it into the mouth, It is notorious that in Bristol (to that I can speak myself, but probably in many other places) he went so far as to hire men—porters, hackney-coachmen, and others—to oppose by force his entrance into any druggist’s shop. But, as the authority for stopping him was derived simply from himself, naturally these poor men found themselves in a metaphysical fix;.not provided for even by Thomas Aquinas or by the prince of Jesuitical casuists. And in this excruciat- ing dilemma would occur such scenes as the following :— ‘Oh, sir,’ would plead the suppliant porter—suppliant, yet semi-imperative (for equally if he did, and if he did not, show fight, the poor man’s daily 5s. seemed endangered) —‘really you must not ; consider, sir, your wife and : Transcendental Philosopher.—‘ Wife | what wife? I have no wife.’ ! Porter.—‘ But, really now, you must not, sir. Didn’t you say no longer ago than yesterday | Transcend. Philos—‘ Pooh, pooh! yesterday is a long time ago. Are you aware, my man, that people are known to have dropped down dead for timely want of opium?’ 1 Vide Othello. PI PELLET AS OOF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER iI Porter.—‘ Ay, but you tell’t me not to hearken Transcend. Philos.—‘ Oh, nonsense. An emergency, a shocking emergency, has arisen—quite unlooked for. No matter what I told you in times long past. That which I zow tell you, is—that, if you don’t remove that arm of yours from the doorway of this most respectable druggist, I shall have a good ground of action against you for assault and battery.’ Am I the man to reproach Coleridge with this vassalage to opium? Heaven forbid! Having groaned myself under that yoke, I pity, and blame him not. But undeniably, such a vassalage must have been created wilfully and consciously by his own craving after genial stimulation ; a thing which I do not blame, but Coleridge did. Kor my own part, duly as the torment relaxed in relief of which I had resorted to opium, I laid aside the opium, not under any meritorious effort of self-conquest ; nothing of that sort do I pretend to; but simply on a prudential instinct warning me not to trifle with an engine so awful of consolation and support, nor to waste upon a momentary uneasiness what might eventually prove, in the midst of all-shattering hurricanes, the great elixir of resurrection.. What was it that did in reality make me an opium-eater? That affection which finally drove me into the haditual use_of opium, what was it? Pain-was it? No, but misery: Casual overcasting of sunshine was it? No, but blank desolation. Gloom was it that ‘might have departed? No, but settled and abiding darkness— Total eclipse, Without all hope of day! } Yet whence derived? Caused by what? Caused, as I might truly plead, by youthful distresses in London ; were it not that these distresses were due, in their ultimate origin, to my own unpardonable folly ; and to that folly I trace many ruins. Oh, spirit of merciful interpretation, angel of forgiveness to youth and its aberrations, that 1 Samson Agonistes. 12 CONFESSIONS OF hearkenest for ever as if to some sweet choir of far-off female intercessions! will ye, choir that intercede—wilt thou, angel that forgivest—join together, and charm away that mighty phantom, born amidst the gathering mists of remorse, which strides after me in pursuit from forgotten days—towering for ever into proportions more and more colossal, overhanging and overshadowing my head 4s if close behind, yet dating its nativity from hours that are fled by more than half-a-century? Qh heavens! that it should be possible for a child not seventeen years old, by a momentary blindness, by listening to a false, false whisper from his own bewildered heart, by one erring step, by a motion this way or that, to change the currents of his destiny, to poison the fountains of his peace, and in the twinkling of an eye to lay the foundations ofa life- long repentance! Yet, alas! I must abide by the realities of the case. And one thing is clear, that amidst such bitter self-reproaches as are now extorted from me by the anguish of my recollections, it cannot be with any purpose of weaving plausible excuses, or of evading blame, that I trace the origin of my confirmed opium~eating to-a necessity growing out of my early sufferings in the streets of London. Because, though true it is that the re-agency of these London sufferings did in after years enforce the use of opium, equally it is true that the sufferings them- “selves grew out of my own folly. What really calls for excuse, is not the recourse to opium, when opium had become the one sole remedy available for the malady, but. those follies which had themselves produced that malady. I, for my part, after I had become a regular opium- eater, and from mismanagement had fallen into miserable excesses in the use of opium, did nevertheless, four several times, contend successfully against the dominion of this drug ; did four several times renounce it ; renounced it for long intervals; and finally resumed it upon the warrant of my enlightened and deliberate judgment, as being of two evils by very much the least. In this I acknowledge nothing that calls for excuse. I repeat again oe . { : ’ \ : AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 13 and again, that not the application of opium, with its deep tranquillising powers to the mitigation of evils, be- queathed by my London hardships, is what reasonably calls for sorrow, but that extravagance of childish folly which precipitated me into scenes naturally producing such hardships. These scenes I am now called upon to fetrace: |” Possibly they are sufficiently interesting to merit, even or their own account, some short record; but at present, and at this point, they have become indispensable as a key to the proper ‘understanding of all which follows. For in these incidents of my early life is found the entire substratum, together with the secret and underlying “motive* of those pompous dreams and dream-sceneries which were in reality the true objects—first and last— contemplated in these Confessions. My father died when. Iwas in my seventh year, leav- ing six children, including myself (viz., four sons and two daughters), to the care of four guardians and of our mother, who was invested with the legal authority of a guardian. This word ‘guardian’ kindles a fiery thrilling in my nerves ; so much was that special power of guardian- ship, as wielded by one of the four, concerned in the sole capital error of my boyhood. ‘To this error my own folly would hardly have been equal, unless by concurrence with the obstinacy of others. From the bitter remem- brance of this error in myself—of this obstinacy in my hostile guardian, suffer me to draw the privilege of making a moment’s pause upon this subject of legal guardianship. There is not (I believe) in human society, under whatever form of civilisation, any trust or delegated duty which has more often been negligently or even perfidiously administered. In the.days of classical Greece and Rome, my own private impression, founded on the collation of many incidental notices, is—that this, beyond all other * Motive:—The word motive is here used in the sense attached by artists and connoisseurs to the technical word motivo, applied to pictures, or to the separate movements in a musical theme. } | . ! 14 CONFESSIONS OF forms of domestic authority, furnished to wholesale rapine and peculation their very amplest arena. The relation of father and son, as was that of patron and client, was generally, in the practice of life, cherished with religious fidelity : whereas the solemn duties of the susor (i.e. the guardian) to his ward, which had their very root and origin in the tenderest adjurations of a dying friend, though subsequently refreshed by the hourly spectacle of helpless orphanage playing round the margins of pitfalls hidden by flowers, spoke but seldom to the sensibilities of a Roman through any language of oracular power. Few indeed, if any, were the obligations, in a proper sense moral, which pressed upon the Roman. The main fountains of moral obligation had in Rome, by law or by custom, been thoroughly poisoned. Marriage had cor- rupted itself through the facility of divorce, and through the consequences of that facility (viz., levity in choosing, and fickleness in adhering to the choice), into so exquisite a traffic of selfishness, that it could not yield so much as a phantom model of sanctity. The relation of husband and » wife had, for all moral impressions, perished amongst the Romans. The relation of father and child had all its capacities of holy tenderness crushed out of it under the fierce pressure of penal and vindictive enforcements. The duties of the client to his patron stood upon no basis of simple gratitude or simple fidelity (corresponding to the feudal fea/ty), but upon a basis of prudential terror ; terror from positive law, or from social opinion. From the first intermeddling of law with the movement of the higher moral affections, there is an end to freedom in the act—to purity in the motive—to dignity in the personal relation. Accordingly, in the France of the pre-revolu- tionary period, and in the China of all periods, it has been with baleful effects to the national morals that positive law has come in aid of the paternal rights. And in the Rome of ancient history it may be said that this one original and rudimental wrong done to the holy freedom of human affections, had the effect of extinguishing thenceforward all conscientious. movement in whatever AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 15 direction. And thus, amongst a people naturally more highly principled than the Greeks, if you except ebulli- tions of public spirit and patriotism (too often of mere ignoble nationality), no class of actions stood upon any higher basis _of motive than (1) legal ordinance; (2) superstitious fear; or (3) servile compliance with the insolent exactions of popular usage. Strange, therefore, it would have been if the sufor of obscure orphans, with extra temptations and extra facilities for indulging them, should have shown himself more faithful to his trust than the governor of provinces—pretorian or proconsular. Yet who more treacherous and rapacious than he? Rarest of men was the upright governor that accepted no bribes from the criminal, and extorted no ransoms from the timid. He nevertheless, as a public trustee, was watched by the jealousy of political competitors, and had by possibility a solemn audit to face in the senate or in the forum; perhaps in both. But the tutor, who administered a private trust on behalf of orphans, might count on the certainty that no public attention could ever be” attracted ‘to concerns so obscure, and politically so uninteresting. _ Reasonably, therefore, and by all analogy, a Roman must have regarded the ordinary domestic sutor as almost inevitably a secret delinquent using the oppor- tunities and privileges of his office as mere instruments for working spoliation and ruin upon the inheritance confided _to his care. This deadly and besetting evil of Pagan days must have deepened a hundredfold the glooms over- hanging the death-beds of parents. Too often the dying father could not fail to read in his own life-long experi- ence, that, whilst seeking special protection for his children, he might himself be introducing amongst them a separate and imminent danger. Leaving behind him a little household of infants, a little fleet (as it might be represented) of fairy pinnaces, just raising their anchors in preparation for crossing the mighty deeps of life, he made signals for ‘convoy.’ Some one or two (at best imperfectly known to him), amongst those who traversed the same seas, he accepted in that character ; but doubt- 16 CONFESSIONS OF fully, sorrowfully, fearfully; and at the very moment when the faces of his children were disappearing amongst the vapours of death, the miserable thought would cross his prophetic soul—that too probably this pretended ‘convoy,’ under the strong temptations of the case, might eventually become pirates ; robbers, at the least ; and by possibility wilful misleaders to the inexperience of his children. From this dreadful aggravation of the anguish at any rate besetting the death-beds of parents summoned away from a group of infant children, there has been a mighty deliverance wrought in a course of centuries by the vast diffusion of Christianity. In these days, wheresoever an atmosphere is breathed that has been purified by Christian charities and Christian principles, this household pestilence has been continually dwindling : and in the England of this generation there is no class of peculation which we so seldom hear of : one proof of which is found in the indifference with which most of us regard the absolute security offered to children by the Court of Chancery. My father, therefore, as regarded the quiet of his dying hours, benefited by the felicity of his times and his country. He made the best selection for the future guardianship of his six children that his opportunities allowed ; from his circle of intimate friends, he selected the four who stood highest in his estimation for honour and practical wisdom : which done, and relying for the redressing of any harsh tendencies in male guardians upon the discretional power lodged in my mother, thenceforth he rested from his anxieties. Not one of these guardians but justified his “ choice so far as honour and integrity were concerned. Yet, after all, there is a limit (and sooner reached perhaps in England than in other divisions of Christendom) to the good that can be achieved in such cases by prospective wisdom. For we, in England, more absolutely than can be asserted of any other nation, are not fainéans + rich and poor, all of us have something to do. To Italy it is that we must look for a peasantry idle through two-thirds of their time. To Spain it is that we must look for an AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 17 aristocracy physically’ degraded under the ignoble training of women and priests ; and for princes (such as Ferdinand VII.) that make it the glory of their lives to have em- broidered a petticoat. Amongst ourselves of this current generation, whilst those functions of guardianship may be surely counted on which presume conscientious loyalty to the interests of their wards ; on the other hand, all which presume continued vigilance and provision from afar are, in simple truth, hardly compatible with our English state of society. The guardians chosen by my father, had they been the wisest and also the most energetic of men, could not in many conceivable emergencies have fulfilled his secret wishes. Of the four men, one was a merchant (not in the narrow sense of Scotland, derived originally from France, where no class of merchant princes has ever existed, but in the large noble sense of England—of Florence—of Venice): consequently, his extensive relations with sea- ports and distant colonies continually drawing off his attention, and even his personal presence, from domestic affairs, made it hopeless that he should even attempt more on behalf of his wards than slightly to watch the adminis- tration of their pecuniary interests. A second of our guardians was a rural magistrate, but in a populous district close upon Manchester, which even at that time was belted with a growing body of turbulent aliens—Welsh and Irish. He therefore, overwhelmed by the distractions of his - official station, rightly perhaps conceived himself to have fulfilled his engagements as a guardian, if he stood ready to come forward upon any difficulty arising, but else in ordinary cases devolved his functions upon those who enjoyed more leisure. In that category stood, beyond a doubt, a.third of our guardians, the Rev. Samuel H., who 1 It is asserted by travellers—English, French, and German alike —that the ducal order in Spain (as that order of the Spanish peerage most carefully withdrawn from what Kentucky would call the rougA- and-tumble discipline of a popular education) exhibit in their very persons and bodily development undisguised evidences of effeminate habits operating through many generations. It would be satisfactory to know the unexaggerated truth on this point; the truth unbiassed alike by national and by democratic prejudices, Cc 18 CONFESSIONS OF was at the time of my father’s death a curate at some church (I believe) in Manchester or in Salford.’ This gentleman represented a class—large enough at all times by necessity of human nature, but in those days far larger than at present—that class, 1 mean, who sympathise with no spiritual sense or spiritual capacities in man; who understand by religion simply a respectable code of ethics —leaning for support upon some great mysteries dimly traced in the background, and commemorated in certain great church festivals by the e/der churches of Christen- dom ; as, ¢.g., by the English, which does not stand as to age on the Reformation epoch, by the Romish, and by the Greek. He had composed a body of about 330 sermons, which thus, at the rate of two every Sunday, revolved through a cycle of three years ;\that period being modestly assumed as sufficient for insuring to their eloquence total oblivion:, Possibly to a cynic, some shorter cycle might have seemed equal to that effect, since their topics rose but rarely above the level of prudential ethics; and the style, though scholarly, was not impressive. Asa preacher, Mr. H. was sincere, but not earnest, He was a good and conscientious man ; and he made a high valuation of the pulpit as an organ_of civilisation. for co-operating with books; but it was impossible for any man, starting from the low ground of themes so unimpassioned and so desultory as the benefits of industry, the danger from bad companions, the importance of setting a good example, or the value of perseverance—to pump up any persistent stream of earnestness either in himself or in his auditors. These auditors, again, were not of a class to desire much 1 Salford is a large town legally distinguished from Manchester for parliamentary purposes, and divided from it physically by a river, but else virtually, as regards intercourse and reciprocal influence, is a quarter of Manchester; in fact, holding the same relation to Man- chester that Southwark does to London ; or, if the reader insists upon having a classical illustration of the case, the same relation that in ancient days Argos did to Mycenz. An invitation to dinner given by the public herald of Argos could be heard to the centre of Mycenz, and by a gourmand, if the dinner promised to be specially good, in the remoter suburb, a AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 19 earnestness. There were no naughty people among them : most of them were rich, and came to church in carriages : and, as a natural result of their esteem for my reverend guardian, a number of them combined to build a church for him—viz., St. Peter’s, at the point of confluence between Moseley Street and the newly projected Oxford Street—then existing only as a sketch in the portfolio of a surveyor. But what connected myself individually with Mr. H. was, that two or three years previously I, together with one of my brothers (five years my senior), had been placed under his care for classical instruction. This was done, I believe, in obedience to a dying injunction of my father, who had a just esteem for Mr. S. H. as an upright man, but apparently too exalted an opinion of his scholar- ship: for he was but an indifferent Grecian. In ‘whatever way the appointment arose, so it was that this gentleman, previously ‘ufor in the Roman sense to all of us, now became to my brother and myself tutor also in the common English sense. From the age of eight, up to eleven and a-half, the character and intellectual attainments of Mr. H. were therefore influentially important to myself in the development of my powers, such as they were. Even his 330 sermons, which rolled overhead with such slender effect upon his general congregation, to me became a real instrument of improvement. One-half of these, indeed, were all that I heard ; for, as my father’s house (Greenhay) stood at this time in the country, Manchester not having yet overtaken it, the distance obliged us to go in a carriage, and only to the morning service ; but every sermon in this morning course was propounded to me as a textual basis upon which I was to raise a mimic duplicate—sometimes a pure miniature abstract—sometimes a rhetorical expan- sion—but preserving as much as possible of the original language, and also (which puzzled me painfully) preserv- ing the exact succession of the thoughts; which might be easy where they stood in some dependency upon each other, as, for instance, in the development of an argument, but in arbitrary or chance arrangements was often as trying to my powers as any feat of rope-dancing. I, therefore, 20 CONFESSIONS OF amongst that whole congregation, was the one sole care- worn auditor—agitated about that which, over all other heads, flowed away like water over marble slabs~viz., the somewhat torpid sermon of my somewhat torpid guardian. But this annoyance was not wholly lost : and those same 3$° sermons, which (lasting only through sixteen minutes each) were approved and forgotten by everybody else, for me became a perfect palastra of intellectual gymnastics far better suited to my childish weakness than could. have been the sermons of Isaac Barrow or Jeremy Taylor. In these last, the gorgeous imagery would have dazzled my feeble vision, and in both the gigantic thinking would have crushed my efforts at apprehension. I drew, in fact, the deepest benefits from this weekly exercise. Perhaps, also, in the end it ripened into a great advantage for me, though long and bitterly I complained of it, that I was not allowed to use a pencil in taking notes: all was to be charged upon the memory. But it is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and 1 * That whole congregation’ :—Originally at churches which I do not remember, where, however, in consideration of my tender age, the demands levied upon my memory were much lighter. Two or three years later, when I must have been nearing my tenth year, and when St. Peter’s had been finished, occurred the opening, and consequently (as an indispensable pre-condition) the consecration of that edifice by the bishop of the diocese (viz., Chester). I, as a ward of the incum- bent, was naturally amongst those specially invited to the festival ; and I remember a little incident which exposed broadly the conflict of feelings inherited by the Church of England from the Puritans of the seventeenth century. The architecture of the church was Grecian ; and certainly the enrichments, inside..or.outside, were few enough, neither florid nor obtrusive... But inthe centre of the ceiling, for the sake of breaking the monotony of so large a blank white surface, there was moulded, in plaster-of-Paris, a large tablet or shield, charged with a cornucopia of fruits and flowers. And yet, when we were all assembled in the vestry waiting—rector, churchwardens, architect, and trains of dependants—there.arose a deep buzz of anxiety, which soon ripened into an articulate expression of fear, that the bishop would think himself bound, like the horrid eikonoclasts of 1645, to issue his decree of utter averruncation to the simple decoration overhead. Fear- fully did we all tread the little aisles in the procession of the prelate. Earnestly my lord looked upwards ; but finally—were it courtesy, or doubtfulness as to his ground, or approbation—he passed on, AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 21 becomes trustworthy as you trust it. So that, in my third year of practice, I found my abstracting and condensing powers sensibly enlarged. My guardian was gradually better satisfied : for unfortunately (and in the beginning it was unfortunate) always one witness could be summoned against me.upon any impeachment of my fidelity—viz., the sermon itself ; since, though lurking amongst the 330, the wretch was easily forked out. But these appeals grew fewer ; and my guardian, as I have said, was continually better satisfied. Meantime, might not I be continually less satisfied with him and his 330 sermons? Not at all : loving and trusting, without doubt or reserve, and with the deepest principles of veneration rooted in my nature, I never, upon meeting something more impressive than the average complexion of my guardian’s discourses, for one moment thought of him as worse or feebler than others, but simply as different ; and no more quarrelled with him for his characteristic languor, than with a green riband for not being blue. By mere accident, I one day heard quoted a couplet which seemed to me! sublime. It described a preacher such as sometimes arises in difficult times, or in fermenting times, a son of thunder, that looks all enemies in the face, and volunteers a defiance even when it would have been easy to evade it. The lines were written by Richard Baxter—who baffled often with self- created storms from the first dawn of the Parliamentary War in 1642, through the period of Cromwell (to whom he was personally odious), and, finally, through the trying reigns of the second Charles and of the second James. As a pulpit orator, he was perhaps the Whitfield of the seven- teenth century—the Leuconomos of Cowper. And thus it is that he describes the impassioned character of his own preaching — I preach’d, as never sure to preach again ; [Even that was telling ; but then followed this thunder- peal | And_as a dying man to dying men. This couplet, which seemed to me equally for weight and 22 CONFESSIONS OF for splendour like molten gold, laid bare another aspect of the Catholic church ; revealed it as a Church militant and crusading. Not even thus, however, did I descry any positive imperfection in my guardian. He and Baxter had fallen upon different generations. Baxter’s century, from first to last, was revolutionary. Along the entire course of that seventeenth century, the great principles of repre- sentative government and the rights of conscience? were passing through the anguish of conflict and fiery trial. Now again in my own day, at the close of the eighteenth century, it is true that all the elements of social life were thrown into the crucible—but on behalf of our neighbours, no longer of ourselves. No longer, therefore, was invoked the heroic pleader, ready for martyrdom, preaching, there- fore, ‘as never sure to preach again’; and I no more made it a defect in my guardian that he wanted energies for combating evils now forgotten, than that he had not in patriotic fervour leaped into a gulf, like the fabulous Roman martyr Curtius, or in zeal for liberty had not mounted a scaffold, like the real English martyr Algernon Sidney. Every Sunday, duly as it revolved, brought with it this cruel anxiety. On Saturday night under sad antici- pation, on Sunday night under sadder experimental know- ledge, of my trying task, I slept ill: my pillow was stuffed with thorns ; and until Monday morning’s inspection and armilustrium had dismissed me from parade to ‘stand at ease,’ verily I felt like a false steward summoned to some killing audit. Then suppose Monday to be invaded by some horrible intruder, visitor perhaps from a band of my guardian’s poor relations, that in some undiscovered nook of Lancashire seemed in fancy to blacken all the fields, and suddenly at a single note of ‘caw, caw,’ rose in one 1 * The rights of conscience’ :—With which it is painful to know that Baxter did not sympathise. Religious toleration he called ‘ Soul- murder. And, if you reminded him that the want of this toleration had been his own capital grievance, he replied, ‘Ah, but the cases were very different : I was in the right ; whereas the vast majority of those who will benefit by this newfangled toleration are shockingly in the wrong.’ — ee See yr) ane ac wn: REY AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 23 vast cloud like crows, and settled down for weeks at the table of my guardian and his wife, whose noble hospitality would never allow the humblest among them to be sad- dened by a faint welcome. In such cases, very possibly the whole week did not see the end of my troubles. On these terms, for upwards of three-and-a-half years —that is, from my eighth to beyond my eleventh birthday —my guardian and I went on cordially ; he never once angry, as indeed he never had any reason for anger; | never once treating my task either as odious (which in the most abominable excess it was), or, on the other hand, as costing but a trivial effort, which practice might have taught me to hurry through with contemptuous ease. To the very last I found no ease at all in this weekly task, which never ceased to be ‘a thorn in the flesh’: and I believe that my guardian, like many of the grim Pagan divinities, inhaled a flavour of fragrant incense, from the fretting and stinging of anxiety which, as it were some holy vestal fire, he kept alive by this periodic exaction. It gave him pleasure that he could reach me in the very recesses of my \dtéams, where even a Pariah might look for rest ; so that the Sunday, which to man, and even to the brutes within his gates, offered an interval of rest, for _ me was signalised as a day of martyrdom, Yet in. this, after all, it is: possible that he did me a service: for my constitutional infirmity of mind ran but too determinately towards the sleep of endless reverie, and of dreamy -abstraction from life and its realities. Whether serviceable or not, however, the connexion between my guardian and myself was now drawing to its close. Some months after my eleventh birthday, Greenhay* was sold, and my mother’s establishment—both children and servants—was translated to Bath: only that for a few months I and one brother were still left under the care of 1 «Greenhay’ :—A country-house built by my father ; and at the time of its foundation (say in 1791 or 1792) separated from the last outskirts of Manchester by an entire mile ; but now, and for many a year, overtaken by the hasty strides of this great city, and long since (I presume) absorbed into its mighty uproar. 24 CONFESSIONS OF Mr. Samuel H. ; so far, that is, as regarded our education. Else, as regarded the luxurious comforts of a thoroughly English home, we became the guests, by special invitation, of a young married couple in Manchester—viz., Mr. and Mrs, K 1. This incident, though otherwise without results, I look back upon with feelings inexpressibly..pro- found, as a jewelly parenthesis of pathetic happiness—such as emerges but once in any man’s life. Mr. K. was a young and rising American merchant ; by which I mean, that he was an Englishman who exported to the United States. He had married about three years previously a pretty and amiable young woman—well educated, and endowed with singular compass of intellect. But the distinguishing feature in this household was the spirit of love which, under the benign superintendence of the mis- tress, diffused itself through all its members. The late Dr. Arnold. of .Rugby, amongst many novel ideas, which found no welcome even with his friends, insisted earnestly and often upon this—viz., that a great danger was threatening our social system in Great Britain, from the austere separation existing between our educated and our working classes, and that a more conciliatory style of intercourse between these two bisections of our social body must be established, or else—a tremendous revolu- tion. This is not the place to discuss so large a question ; and I shall content myself with making two remarks, The first is this—that, although a change of the sort contemplated by Dr. Arnold might, if considered as an operative cause, point forward to some advantages, on the other hand, if considered as an effect, it points backward to a less noble constitution of society by much than we already enjoy. Those nations whose upper classes speak paternally and caressingly to the working classes, and to servants in particular, do so because they speak from the lofty stations of persons having civil rights to those who have none. Two centuries back, when a military chieftain addressed his soldiers as ‘my children,’ he did so because he was an irresponsible despot exercising uncontrolled powers of life and death. From.the. moment when legal AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 25 rights have been.won for the poorest classes, inevitable respect on the part of the higher classes extinguishes for ever the affectionate style which belongs naturally to the state of pupilage or infantine bondage. That is my first remark: my second is this—that the change advocated by Dr. Arnold, whether promising or not, 1s practically impossible ; or possible, I should say, through one sole channel—viz., that of domestic servitude. There only do the two classes concerned come hourly into contact. On that stage only they meet without intrusion upon each other. There only is an opening for change. And a wise mistress, who possesses tact enough to combine a gracious affability with a self-respect that never slumbers nor permits her to descend into gossip, will secure the attachment of all young and impressible women. Such a mistress was Mrs. K She had won the gratitude of her servants from the first, by making the amplest pro- vision for their comfort ; their confidence, by listening with patience, and counselling with prudence; and their respect, by refusing to intermeddle with gossiping per- sonalities always tending to slander. To this extent, perhaps, most mistresses might follow her example. But the happiness which reigned in Mrs. K "s house at this time depended very much upon special causes. All the eight persons had the advantage of youth; and the three young female servants were under the spell of fascination, such as could rarely be counted on, from a spectacle held up hourly before their eyes, that spectacle which of all others is the most touching to womanly sensibilities, and which any one of these servants might hope, without pre- sumption, to realise for herself—the spectacle, I mean, of a happy marriage union between two persons, who lived in harmony so absolute with each other, as to be indepen- dent of the world outside. How tender and self-sufficing such a union might be, they saw with their own eyes. The season was then mid-winter, which of itself draws closer all household ties. Their own labours, as generally in respectable English services, were finished for the most part by two o’clock; and as the hours of evening drew 26 CONFESSIONS OF nearer, when the master’s return might be looked for without fail, beautiful was the smile of anticipation upon the gentle features of the mistress: even more beautiful the reflex of that smile, half-unconscious, and half-repressed, upon the features of the sympathising hand-maidens. One child, a little girl of two years old, had then crowned the happiness of the K s. She naturally lent her person at all times, and apparently in all places at once, to the improvement of the family groups. My brother and myself, who had been trained from infancy to the courteous treatment of servants, filled up a vacancy in the graduated scale of ascending ages, and felt in varying degrees the depths of a peace which we could not adequately under- stand or appreciate. Bad tempers there were none amongst us ; nor any opening for personal jealousies ;_ nor, through the privilege of our common youth, either angry recollections breathing from the past, or fretting anxieties gathering from the future. The spirit of hope and the spirit of peace (so it seemed to me, when looking back upon this profound calm) had, for their own enjoyment, united in a sisterly league to blow a solitary bubble of visionary happiness—and to sequester from the unresting hurricanes of life one solitary household of eight persons within a four months’ lull, as if within some Arabian tent on some untrodden wilderness, withdrawn from human intrusion, or even from knowledge, by worlds of mist and vapour. How deep was that lull! and yet, as in a human atmosphere, how frail! Did the visionary bubble burst at once? Not so: but silently and by measured steps, like a dissolving palace of snow, it collapsed. In the superb expression of Shakspere, minted by himself, and drawn from his own aerial fancy, like a cloud it ‘ dis- limned’ ; lost its lineaments by stealthy steps. Already the word ‘ parting’ (for myself and my brother were under summons for Bath) hoisted the first signal for breaking up. Next, and not very long afterwards, came a mixed signal: alternate words of joy and grief—marriage and death severed the sisterly union amongst the young female AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER servants. Then, thirdly, but many years later, vanished from earth, and from peace the deepest that can support itself on earth, summoned to a far deeper peace, the mistress of the household herself, together with her first- born child. Some years later, perhaps twenty from this time, as I stood sheltering myself from rain in a shop within the most public street of Manchester, the master of the establishment drew my attention to a gentleman on the opposite side of the street—roaming along in a reck- less style of movement, and apparently insensible to the notice which he attracted. ‘That,’ said the master of the shop, ‘was once. a leading merchant in our town ; but he met with great commercial embarrassments. There was no impeachment of his integrity, or (as I believe) of his discretion. But what with these commercial calamities, and deaths in his family, he lost all’ hope ; and you see what sort of consolation it is that he seeks ’—-meaning to say that his style of walking argued intoxication. I did not think so. There was a settled misery in his eye, but complicated with shat an expression of nervous distraction, that, if it should increase, would make life an intolerable burden. I never saw him again, and thought with horror of his being called in old age to face the fierce tragedies of life. For many reasons, I recoiled from forcing myself upon his notice: but I had ascertained, some time previously to this casual rencontre, that he and myself were, at that date, all that remained of the once joyous household. At present, and for many a year, I am myself the sole relic from.that household sanctuary —sweet, solemn, profound—that concealed, as in some ark float- ing on solitary seas, eight persons, since called away, all except myself, one after one, to that rest which only could be deeper than ours was then. When I left the K s, I left Manchester ; and dur- ing the next three years I was sent to two very different schools ; first, to a public one—viz., the Bath Grammar School, then and since famous for its excellence—secondly, to a private school in Wiltshire. At the end of the three years, I found myself once again in Manchester. I was — CONFESSIONS OF then fifteen years old, and a trifle more; and as it had come to the knowledge of.Mr. G,, a banker in Lincoln- shire (whom hitherto I have omitted to notice amongst my guardians, as the one too generally prevented from interfering by his remoteness from the spot, but whom otherwise I should have recorded with honour, as by much the ablest amongst them), that some pecuniary advantages were attached to a residence at the Manchester Grammar School, whilst in other respects that school seemed as eligible as any other, he had counselled my mother to send me thither. In fact, a three years’ residence at this school obtained an annual allowance for seven years of nearly (if not quite) £50; which sum, added to my own patrimonial income of £150, would have made up the annual £200 ordinarily considered the proper allowance for an Oxford under-graduate. No objection arising from any quarter, this plan was adopted, and soon after- wards carried into effect. On a day, therefore, it was in the closing autumn (or rather in the opening winter) of 1800 that my first intro- duction took place to the Manchester Grammar School. The school-room showed already in its ample proportions some hint of its pretensions as an endowed school, or school of that class which I believe peculiar to England. To this limited extent had the architectural sense of power been timidly and parsimoniously invoked. Beyond that, nothing had been attempted ; and the dreary expanse of whitewashed walls, that at so small a cost might have been embellished by plaster-of-Paris friezes and large medallions, illustrating to the eye of the youthful student / the most memorable glorifications of literature—these were bare as the walls of a poor-house or a lazaretto ; buildings whose functions, as thoroughly sad and gloomy, the mind recoils from drawing into relief by sculpture or painting. But this building was dedicated to purposes that were noble. The naked walls clamoured for decora- tion: and how easily might tablets have been moulded— exhibiting (as a first homage to literature) Athens, with the wisdom of Athens, in the person of Pisistratus, con- ” _ AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 29 centrating the general energies upon the revisal and the re-casting of the Jad. Or (second) the Athenian captives in Sicily, within the fifth century B.c., as winning noble mercy for themselves by some Repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet. Such, and so sudden, had been the oblivion of earthly passions wrought by the contemporary poet of Athens that in a moment the wrath of Sicily, with all its billows, ran down into a heavenly calm ; and he that could plead for his redemption no closer relation to Euripides than the accident of recalling some scatterings. from his divine verses, suddenly found his chains dropping to the ground ; and himself, that in the morning had risen a despairing slave in a stone-quarry, translated at once as a favoured brother into a palace of Syracuse. Or, again, how easy to represent (third) ‘the great Emathian conqueror,’ that in the very opening of his career, whilst visiting Thebes with vengeance, nevertheless relented at the thought of literature, and Bade spare The house of Pindarus, when Temple and tower Went to the ground. Alexander might have been represented amongst the colon- nades of some Persian capital—Ecbatana or Babylon, Susa or Persepolis—in the act of receiving from Greece, as a muzzur more awful than anything within the gift of the ‘ barbaric East,’ a jewelled casket containing the J/iad and the Odyssey ; creations that already have lived almost as long as the Pyramids. Puritanically bald and odious therefore, in my eyes, was the hall up which my gwardian and myself paced solemnly—though not Miltonically ‘riding up to the Soldan’s chair,’ yet in fact, within a more limited kingdom, advancing to the chair of a more absolute despot. This potentate was the head-master, or archididascalus, of the Manchester Grammar School; and that school was variously distinguished. It was (1) ancient, having in 30 CONFESSIONS OF fact been founded by a bishop ot Exeter in an early part of the sixteenth century, so as to be now, in 1856, more than 330 years old; (2) it was rich, and was annually growing richer; and (3) it was dignified by a beneficial relation to the magnificent University of Oxford. The head-master at that time was Mr. Charles Lawson. In former editions of this work, 1 created him a doctor ; my object being to evade too close an approach to the realities of the case, and consequently to person- alities, which (though indifferent to myself) would have been in some cases displeasing to others. A doctor, how- ever, Mr. Lawson was not; nor in the account of law a clergyman. Yet most people, governed unconsciously by the associations surrounding their composite idea of a dignified schoolmaster, invested him with the clerical character. And in reality he had taken deacon’s orders in the Church of England. But not the less he held himself to be a layman, and was addressed as such by all his correspondents of rank, who might be supposed best to understand the technical rules of English etiquette. Etiquette in such cases cannot entirely detach itself from law. Now, in English law, as was shown in Horne Tooke’s case, the rule is, once a clergyman, and always a clergyman. ‘The sacred character with which ordination clothes a man is indelible. But, on the other hand, who is a clergyman? Not he that has taken simply the initial orders of a deacon, so at least I have heard, but he that has taken the second and full orders of a priest. If other- wise, then there was a great mistake current amongst Mr. Lawson’s friends in addressing him as an esquire. Squire or not a squire, however, parson or not a parson—whether sacred or profane—Mr. Lawson was in some degree interesting by his position and his recluse habits. Life was over with him, for its hopes and for its trials. Or at most one trial yet awaited him, which was —to fight with a painful malady, and fighting to die. He still had his dying to do: he was in arrear as to that: else all was finished. It struck me (but, with such limited means for judging, I might easily be wrong) that his AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 31 understanding was of a narrow order. But that did not disturb the interest which surrounded him now in his old age (probably seventy-five, or more), nor make any draw- back from the desire I had to spell backwards and re- compose the text of his life. What had been his fortunes in this world? Had they travelled upwards or down- wards? What triumphs had he enjoyed in the sweet and solemn cloisters of Oxford? What mortifications in the harsh world outside? Two only had survived in the malicious traditions of ‘his friends.’ He was a Jacobite (as were so many amongst my dear Lancastrian com- patriots); had drunk the Pretender’s health, and had drunk it in company with that Dr. Byrom who had graced the symposium by the famous equivocating imprompiu’ to the health of that prince. Mr. Lawson had therefore been obliged to witness the final prostration of his political party. That was his earliest mortification. His second, about seven years later, was, that he had been jilted ; and with circumstances (at least so I heard) of cruel scorn. Was it that 4e had interpreted in a sense too flattering for himself ambiguous expressions of favour in the lady ? or that she in cruel caprice had disowned the hopes which she had authorised? However this might be, half-a- century of soothing and reconciling years had cicatrised the wounds of Mr. Lawson’s heart. The lady of 1752, 1 * Equivocating impromptu’:—The party had gathered in a tumultuary way; so that some Capulets had mingled with the Montagues, one of whom called upon Dr. Byrom to drink T/e King, God bless him! and Confusion to the Pretender! Upon which the doctor sang out— God bless the king, of church and state defender ; God bless (no harm in S/essing) the Pretender ! But who Pretender is, and who the King— God bless us all! that’s quite another thing. Dr. Byrom was otherwise famous than as a Jacobite—viz., as the author of a very elaborate shorthand, which (according to some who have examined it) rises even to a philosophic dignity. David Hartley in particular said of it that, ‘if ever a philosophic language (as pro- jected by Bishop Wilkins, by Leibnitz, etc.) should be brought to bear, i in that case Dr. Byrom’s work would furnish the proper character for its notation,’ 32 CONFESSIONS OF if living in 1800, must be furiously wrinkled. And a strange metaphysical question arises: Whether, when the object of an impassioned love has herself faded into a shadow, the fiery passion. itself..can. still survive as an abstraction, still mourn over its wrongs, still clamour for redress. I have heard of such cases. In Wordsworth’s poem of Ruth (which was founded, as I happen to know, upon facts), it is recorded as an affecting incident, that, some months after the first frenzy of her disturbed mind had given way to medical treatment, and had lapsed into a gentler form of lunacy, she was dismissed from confine- ment; and upon finding herself uncontrolled among the pastoral scenes where she played away her childhood, she gradually fell back to the original habits of her life whilst yet undisturbed by sorrow. Something similar had happened to Mr. Lawson; and some time after his first shock, amongst other means for effacing that deep-grooved impression, he had laboured to replace himself, as much as was possible, in the situation of a college student. In this effort he was assisted considerably by the singular arrangement of the house attached to his official station. For an English house it was altogether an oddity, being, in fact, built upon a Roman plan. All the rooms on both storeys had their windows looking down upon a little central court. This court was quadrangular, but so limited in its dimensions, that by a Roman it would have been regarded as the imp/uvium: for Mr. Lawson, how- ever, with a little exertion of fancy, it transmuted itself into a college quadrangle. Here, therefore, were held the daily ‘callings-over,’ at which every student was obliged to answer upon being named. And thus the unhappy man, renewing continually the fancy that he was still standing in an Oxford quadrangle, perhaps cheated himself into the belief that all had been a dream which concerned the caprices of the lady, and the lady herself a phantom. College usages also, which served to strengthen this fanciful a/4i—such, for instance, as the having two plates arranged before him at dinner (one for the animal, the other for the vegetable, food)—were reproduced in , AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 33 Millgate. One sole luxury also, somewhat costly, which, like most young men of easy income, he had allowed him- self at Oxford, was now retained long after it had become practically useless. ‘This was a hunter for himself, and another for his groom, which he continued to keep, in spite of the increasing war-taxes, many a year after he had almost ceased to ride. Once in three or four months he would have the horses saddled and brought out. Then, with considerable effort, he swung himself into the saddle, moved off at a quiet amble, and, in about fifteen or twenty minutes, might be seen returning from an ex- cursion of two miles, under the imagination that he had laid in a stock of exercise sufficient for another period of a hundred days. Meantime Mr. Lawson had sought his main consolation in the great classics of elder days. His senior a/umni were always working their way through some great scenic poet that had shaken the stage of Athens ; and more than one of his classes, never ending, still beginning, were daily solacing him with the gaieties of Horace, in his Epistles or in his Satires. The Horatian jests indeed to Aim never grew old. On coming to the plagosus Orbilius, or any other sally of pleasantry, he still threw himself back in his arm-chair, as he had done through fifty years, with what seemed heart-shaking bursts of sympathetic merriment. Mr. Lawson, indeed, could afford to be sincerely mirthful over the word plagosus. There are gloomy tyrants, exulting in the discipline of fear, to whom and to whose pupils this word must call up remembrances too degrading for any but affected mirth. Allusions that are too fearfully personal cease to be sub- jects of playfulness. Sycophancy only it is that laughs ; and the artificial merriment is but the language of shrink- ing and grovelling deprecation. Different, indeed, was the condition of'the Manchester Grammar School. It was honourable both to the masters and the upper boys, through whom only such a result was possible, that in that school, during my knowledge ot it (viz., during the closing year of the eighteenth century, and the two open- ing years of the nineteenth), all punishments, that appealed D 34 CONFESSIONS OF to the sense of bodily pain, had fallen into disuse ; and this at a period long before any public agitation had begun to stir in that direction. How then was discipline maintained ? It was maintained through the self-discipline of the senior boys, and through the efficacy of their example, combined with their system of rules. _ Noble are the impulses of opening manhood, where they are not utterly ignoble: at that period, I. mean, when the poetic sense begins to blossom, and when boys are first made sensible of the paradise that lurks in female smiles. Had the school been entirely a day-school, too probable it is that the vulgar brawling tendencies of boys left to them- selves would have prevailed. But it happened that the elder section of the school—those on the brink of man- hood, and by incalculable degrees the more scholar-like section, all who read, meditated, or began to kindle into the love of literature—were boarders in Mr. Lawson’s house. The students, therefore, of the house carried an overwhelming influence into the school. They were bound together by links of brotherhood ; whereas the day-scholars were disconnected. Over and above this, it happened luckily that there was no playground, not the smallest, attached to the school ; that is, none was attached to the upper or grammar school. But there was also, and resting on the same liberal endowment, a /ower school, where the whole machinery of teaching was applied to the lowest mechanical accomplishments of reading and writing. The hall in which this servile business was conducted ran under the upper school; it was, therefore, I presume, a subterraneous duplicate of the upper hall. And, since the upper rose only by two or three feet above the level of the neighbouring streets, the lower school should natur- ally have been at a great dépth delow these streets. In that case it would be a dark crypt, such as we see under some cathedrals; and it would have argued a singular want of thoughtfulness in the founder to have laid one part of his establishment under an original curse of dark- ness. As the access to this plebeian school lay downwards through long flights of steps, I never found surplus energy -~. Se pens, wet weg Fnn 4 Pais at nog TEE s AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 35 enough for investigating the problem. But, as the ground broke away precipitously at that point into lower levels, I presume, upon consideration, that the subterranean crypt will be found open on one side to visitations from sun and moon. So that, for this base mechanic school there may, after all, have been a playground. But for ours in the upper air, I repeat, there was none; not so much as would have bleached a lady’s pocket-handkerchief ; and this one defect carried along with it unforeseen advantages. Lord Bacon it is who notices the subtle policy which may lurk in the mere external figure of a table. A square table, having an undeniable head and foot, two polar extremities of what is highest and lowest, a perihelion and an aphelion, together with equatorial sides, opens at a glance a large career to ambition ; whilst a circular table sternly represses all such aspiring dreams, and so does a triangular table. Yet, if the triangle should be right-angled, then the Lucifer seated at the right angle might argue that he subtended all the tenants of the hypothenuse; being, therefore, as much nobler than they as Atlas was nobler than the globe which he carried. It was, by the way, some arrangement of this nature which constituted the original feature of distinction in John o’ Groat’s house, and not at all (as most people suppose) the high northern latitude of this house. John, it seems, finished the feuds for precedency, not by legislating this way or that, but by cutting away the possibility of such feuds through the assistance of a round table. The same principle must have guided King Arthur amongst his knights, Charlemagne amongst his paladins, and sailors in their effectual distribution of the peril attached to a mutinous remonstrance by the admir- able device of a ‘round-robin.’ Even two little girls, as Harrington remarks in his Oceana, have oftentimes hit upon an expedient, through pure mother-wit, more effectual than all the schools of philosophy could have suggested, for insuring the impartial division of an orange ; which expedient is that either of the two shall divide, but then that the other shall have the right of choice. You divide 36 CONFESSIONS OF and I choose. Such is the formula ; and an angel could not devise a more absolute guarantee for the equity of the division than by thus forcing the divider to become the inheritor of any possible disadvantages that he may have succeeded in creating by his own act of division. In all these cases one seemingly trivial precaution opens, in the next stage, into a world of irresistible consequences. And, in our case, an effect not less disproportionate followed out of that one accident, apparently so slight, that we had no playground. We of the seniority, who, by thoughtfulness, and the conscious dignity of dealing largely with literature, were already indisposed to boyish sports, found through the defect of a playground, that our choice and our pride were also our necessity. Even the proudest of us benefited by that coercion; for many would else have sold their privilege of pride for an hour’s amusement, and have become, at least, occasional con- formists. A day more than usually fine, a trial of skill more than usually irritating to the sense of special superiority, would have seduced most of us in the end into the surrender of our exclusiveness. Indiscriminate familiarity would have followed as an uncontrollable result ; since to mingle with others in common acts of business may leave the sense of reserve undisturbed: but all reserve gives way before.a common intercourse in pleasure. As it was, what with our confederation through house-membership, what with our reciprocal sympathies in the problems suggested by books, we had become a club of boys (amongst whom might be four or five that were even young men, counting eighteen or nineteen years) altogether as thoughtful and as_ self-respecting as can often exist even amongst adults. Even the subterraneous school contributed something to our self- esteem. It formed a subordinate section of our own establishment, that kept before our eyes, by force of contrast, the dignity inherent in our own constitution. Its object was to master humble accomplishments that were within the reach of mechanic efforts: everything mechanic is limited; whereas we felt that our object, alia ae a AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 37 even if our name of grammar school presented that object in what seemed too limited a shape, was substantially noble, and tended towards the infinite. But in no long time I came to see that, as to the game, we were all of us under a mistake. Being asked what a grammar school indicates, what it professes to teach, there is scarcely any man who would not reply, ‘Teach? why, it teaches grammar, what else?’ But this is a mistake: as I have elsewhere explained, grammatica in this combination does not mean grammar (though grammar. also obeys the movements. of a most subtle philosophy), but diserasure. Look into Suetonius. Those ‘grammatici’ whom he memorialises as an order_of men flocking to Rome in the days of the Flavian family, were not grammarians at all, but..what the French by a comprehensive name style littérateurs—that is, they were men who (1) studied literature, (2) who taught literature, (3) who practically produced literature. And, upon the whole, grammatica is perhaps the least objectionable Latin equivalent for our word Liverature. Having thus sketched the characteristic points dis- tinguishing the school and the presiding master (for of masters, senior and junior, there were four in this upper school), I return to my own inaugural examination. On this day, memorable to myself, as furnishing the starting-point for so long a series of days, saddened by haughty obstinacy on one side, made effective by folly on the other, no sooner had my guardian retired than Mr. Lawson produced from his desk a volume of the Spectator, and instructed me to throw into as good Latin as I could some paper of Steele’s—not the whole, but perhaps a third part. No better exercise could have been devised for testing the extent of my skill as a Latinist. Aind here I ought to make an explanation. In the previous edition of these Confessions, writing some- times too rapidly, and with little precision in cases of little importance, I conveyed an impression which I had not designed with regard to the true nature of my pretensions as a Grecian; and something of the same 38 CONFESSIONS OF correction will apply to that narrower accomplishment which was the subject of my present examination. Neither in Greek nor in Latin was my knowledge very extensive ; my age made shat impossible ; and especially because in those days there were no decent guides through the thorny jungles of the Latin language, far less of the Greek. When I mention that the Port Royal Greek Grammar translated by Dr. Nugent was about the best key extant in English to the innumerable perplexities of Greek diction, and that, for the res metrica, Morell’s valuable Thesaurus, having then never been reprinted, was rarely to be seen, the reader will conclude that a schoolboy’s knowledge of Greek could not be other than slender. Slender indeed was mine. Yet stop? what was slender? Simply my knowledge of Greek ; for that knowledge stretches by tendency to the infinite ; but not therefore my command of Greek. The knowledge of Greek must always hold some gross proportion to the time spent upon it,—probably, therefore, to the age of the student ; but the command over a language, the power of adapting it plastically to the expression of your own thoughts, is almost exclusively a gift of nature, and has very little connection with time. Take the supreme trinity of Greek scholars that flourished between the English Revolution of 1688 and the beginning of the nineteenth century— which trinity I suppose to be, confessedly, Bentley, Valckenaer, and Porson: such are the men, it will be generally fancied, whose aid should be invoked, in the event of our needing some eloquent Greek inscription on a public monument. I am of a different opinion. The greatest scholars have usually proved to be the poorest composers in either of the classic languages. Sixty years ago, we had, from four separate doctors, four separate Greek versions of Gray’s Edgy, all unworthy of the national scholarship. Yet one of these doctors was actually Porson’s predecessor in the Greek chair at Cambridge. But, as he (Dr. Cooke) was an obscure man, take an undeniable Grecian, of punetilious precision—viz., Richard Dawes, the well-known author AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 39 of the Miscellanea Critica. This man, a very martinet in the delicacies of Greek composition—and who should have been a Greek scholar of some mark, since often enough he flew at the throat of Richard Bentley—wrote and published a specimen of a Greek Paradise Lost, and also two most sycophantic idyls addressed to George Il. on the death of his ‘august’ papa. It is difficult to imagine anything meaner in conception or more childish in expression than these attempts. Now, against them I will stake in competition a copy of iambic verses by a boy, who died, I believe, at sixteen—viz., a son of Mr. Pitt’s tutor, Tomline, Bishop of Winchester.} Universally I contend that the faculty of clothing the thoughts in a Greek dress is a function of natural sensibility, in a great degree disconnected from the extent_or the accuracy. of.the.writer’s grammatical skill in Greek. These explanations are too long. The reader will understand, as their sum, that what I needed in such a case was, not so much a critical familiarity with the syntax of the language, or a copia verborum, as great agility in reviewing the relations of one idea to another, so as to present modern and unclassical objects under such aspects as might suggest periphrases in substitution for direct names,.where. names could not be had, and everywhere to colour my translation with as rich a display of idiomatic forms asthe circumstances of the case would allow. I. succeeded, and beyond.my expectation. For once—being the first time that he had been known to do _ 1 © A copy of iambic verses’ :—They will be found in the work on the Greek article ‘by Middleton, Bishop of Calcutta, who was the boy’s tutor. On this occasion I would wish to observe that verses like Dawes’s, meant to mimic Homer or Theocritus, or more generally dactylic hexameters, are perfectly useless as tests of power to think freely in Greek. If such verses are examined, it will be found that the orchestral magnificence of the metre, and the sonorous cadence of each separate line, absolutely force upon the thoughts a mere necessity of being discontinuous. From this signal defect only iambic senarii are free ; this metre possessing a power of plastic interfusion similar in kind, though inferior in degree, to the English blank verse when Miltonically written, 40 CONFESSIONS OF such a thing, but also the very last—-Mr. Lawson did absolutely pay me a compliment. And with another compliment more than verbal he crowned his gracious condescensions—viz., with my provisional instalment in his highest class ; not the highest at that moment, since there was one other class above us; but this other was on the wing for Oxford within some few weeks ; which change being accomplished, we (viz., I and two others) immedi- ately moved up into the supreme place. Two or three days after this examination—viz., on the Sunday following—I transferred myself to head- quarters at Mr. Lawson’s house. About nine o’clock in the evening, I was conducted by a servant up a short flight of stairs, through a series of gloomy and unfurnished little rooms, having small windows but no doors, to the common room (as in Oxford it would technically be called) of the senior boys. Everything had combined to depress me. To leave the society of accomplished women—zshat was already a signal privation. The season besides was rainy, which in itself is a sure source of depression; and the forlorn aspect of the rooms completed my dejection. But the scene changed as the door was thrown open : faces kindling with animation became visible ; and from a company of boys, numbering sixteen or eighteen, scattered about the room, two or three, whose age entitled them to the rank of leaders, came forward to receive me with a courtesy which I had not looked for. The grave kindness and the absolute sincerity of their manner im- pressed me most favourably. I had lived familiarly with boys gathered from all quarters of the island at the Bath Grammar School: and for some time (when visiting Lord Altamont at Eton) with boys of the highest aristocratic pretensions. At Bath and at Eton, though not equally, there prevailed a tone of higher polish; and in the air, speech, deportment of the majority could be traced at once a premature knowledge of the world. They had indeed the advantage over my new friends in graceful self-possession ; but, on the other hand, the best of them suffered by com- parison. with these.Manchester. boys in the qualities of eel a me ee ei ae 1 AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 41 visible self-restraint and of self-respect. At Eton high rank was distributed pretty liberally ; but in the Manchester school the parents of many boys were artisans, or of that rank ; some even had sisters that were menial servants ; and those who stood higher by pretensions of birth and gentle blood were, at the most, the sons of rural gentry or of clergymen. And I believe that, with the exception of three or four brothers, belonging to a clergyman’s family at York, all were, like myself, natives of Lancashire. At that time my experience was too limited to warrant me in expressing any opinion, one way or the other, upon the relative pretensions—moral and intellectual—of the several provinces in our island. But since then I have seen reason to agree with the late Dr. Cooke Taylor in awarding the pre-eminence, as regards energy, power to face suffering, and other high qualities, to the natives of Lancashire. Even a century back, they were distinguished forthe culture of refined tastes. In musical skill and sensibility, no part of Europe, with the exception of a few places in Germany, could pretend to rival them: and, accordingly, even in Handel’s days, but for the chorus-singers from Lancashire, his oratorios must have remained a treasure, if not absolutely sealed, at any rate most imperfectly revealed. One of the young men, noticing my state of dejection, brought out some brandy—a form of alcohol which I, for my part, tasted now for the first time, having previously taken only wine, and never once in quantities to affect my spirits. So much the greater was my astonishment at the rapid change worked in my state of feeling—a change which at once reinstalled me in my natural ad- vantages for conversation. Towards this nothing was wanting but a question of sufficient interest. And a question arose naturally out of a remark addressed by one of the boys to myself, implying that perhaps I had intentionally timed my arrival so as to escape the Sunday evening exercise. No, I replied; not at all; what was that exercise? Simply an off-hand translation from the little work of Grotius' on the Evidences of Christianity. 1 Entitled De Veritate Christiane Religionis, 42 CONFESSIONS OF Did I know the book? No, I did not; all the direct knowledge which I had of Grotius was built upon his metrical translations into Latin of various fragments surviving from the Greek scenical poets, and these trans- lations had struck me as exceedingly beautiful. On the other hand, his work of highest pretension, De Fure Belli et Pacis, so signally praised by Lord Bacon, I had not read at all; but I had heard such an account of it from a very thoughtful person as made it probable that Grotius was stronger, and felt himself stronger, on literary than on philosophic ground. Then, with regard to his little work on the Mosaic and Christian revelations, I had heard very disparaging opinions about it ; two especially. One amounted to no more than this—that the question was argued with a logic far inferior, in point of cogency, to that of Lardner and Paley. Here several boys interposed their loud assent, as regarded Paley in particular. Paley’s Evidences, at that time just seven years old, had already become a subject of study amongst them. But the other objection impeached not so much the dialectic acuteness as the learning of Grotius—at least, the appropriate learn- ing. According to the anecdote current upon this subject, Dr. Edward Pococke, the great oriental scholar of England in the seventeenth century, when called upon to translate the little work of Grotius into Arabic or Turkish, had re- plied by pointing to the idle legend of Mahomet’s pigeon or dove, as a reciprocal messenger between the prophet and heaven—which legend had been accredited and adopted by Grotius in the blindest spirit of credulity. Such a base- less fable, Pococke alleged, would work a double mischief ; not only it would ruin the authority of that particular book in the East, but would damage Christianity for generations, by making known to the followers of the Prophet that their master was undervalued amongst the Franks on the authority of nursery tales, and that these tales were accredited by the leading Frankish scholars. A twofold result of evil would follow : not only would our Christian erudition and our Christian scholars be scandalously disparaged ; a consequence that in some CP clin Be, AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 43 cases might not be incompatible with a sense amongst Mahometans that the strength of Christianity itself was left unaffected by the errors and blunders of its champions; but, secondly, there would be in this case a strong reaction against Christianity itself. Plausibly enough it would be inferred that a vast religious philosophy could have no powerful battery of arguments in reserve, when it placed its main anti-Mahometan reliance upon so childish a fable: since, allowing even for a blameless assent to this fable amongst nations having no direct intercourse with Mussul- mans, still it would argue a shocking frailty in Christianity that its main pleadings rested, not upon any strength of its own, but simply upon a weakness in its antagonist. At this point, when the cause of Grotius seemed utterly desperate, G (a boy whom subsequently I had reason to admire as equally courageous, truthful, and far- seeing) suddenly changed the whole field of view. He offered no defence for the-ridiculous fable of the pigeon ; which pigeon, on the contrary, he represented as drawing in harness with that Christian goose which at one time was universally believed by Mahometans to lead the vanguard of the earliest Crusaders, and which, in a limited extent, really had been a true historical personage. So far he gave up Grotius as indefensible. But on the main question, and the very extensive question, of his apparent imbecility when collated with Paley, etc., suddenly and in one sentence he revolutionised the whole logic of that com- parison. Paley and Lardner, he said, what was it that they sought! Their object was avowedly to benefit by any argument, evidence, or presumption whatsoever, no matter whence drawn, so long as it was true or probable, and fitted to sustain the credibility of any element in the Christian creed. Well, was not shat object common to them and to Grotius? Not at all. Too often had he (the boy G ) secretly noticed the abstinence of Grotius (apparently unaccountable) from certain obvious advantages of argument, not to suspect that, in narrowing his own field of disputation, he had a deliberate purpose, and was moving upon the line of some very different policy. Clear 44 _ CONFESSIONS OF it was to him that Grotius, for some reason, declined to receive evidence except from one special and limited class of witnesses. Upon this, some of us laughed at sucha self-limitation as a wild bravado, recalling that rope-danc- ing feat of some verse-writers who, through each several stanza in its turn, had gloried in dispensing with some one separate consonant, some vowel, or some diphthong, and thus achieving a triumph such as crowns with laurel that pedestrian athlete who wins a race by hopping on one leg, or wins it under the inhuman condition of confining both legs within a sack. ‘No, xo,’ impatiently interrupted G ‘All such fantastic conflicts with self-created difficulties terminate in pure ostentation, and profit no- body. But the self-imposed limitations of Grotius had a special purpose, and realise a value not otherwise attain- able.’ If Grotius accepts no arguments or presumptions except from Mussulmans, from Infidels, or from those who rank as Neutrals, then has he adapted his book to a separate and peculiar audience. The Neutral man will hearken to authorities notoriously Neutral ; Mussulmans will show deference to the statements of Mussulmans ; the Sceptic will bow to the reasonings of Scepticism. All these persons, that would have been repelled on the very threshold from such testimonies as begin in a spirit of hostility to themselves, will listen thoughtfully to sugges- tions offered in a spirit of conciliation ; much more so if offered by people occupying the same ground at starting as themselves. At the cost of some disproportion, I have ventured to rehearse this inaugural conversation amongst the leaders of the school. Whether G were entirely correct in this application of a secret key to the little work of Grotius, Ido not know. I take blame to myself that I do not; for I also must have been called upon for my quota to the Sunday evening studies on the De Veritate, and must therefore have held in my hands the ready means for solving the question.' 1 Some excuse, however, for my own want of energy is suggested by the fact that very soon after my matriculation Mr. Lawson sub- Oe gener nN | heard of in boyhood. _ Was G AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 45 Meantime, as a solitary act of silent observation in a boy not fifteen, this deciphering idea of G ’s, in direct resistance to the received idea, extorted my admiration ; _ and equally, whether true or false as regarded the im- _ mediate fact. That any person, in the very middle storm of chase, when a headlong movement. carries all impulses into one current, should in. the twinkling of an eye recall himself to the unexpected ‘doubles’ of the game, wheel as that wheels, and sternly resist the instincts of the one preoccupying assumption, argues a sagacity not often right? In that case he picked a lock which others had. failed to pick. Was he wrong? In that case he sketched the idea and outline _of a better work (better, as more original and more | special in its service) than any which Grotius has himself accomplished. Not, however, the particular boy, but. the. particular school, it was my purpose, in this place, to signalise for \ \praise_and gratitude. In after years, when an under- graduate at Oxford, I had an opportunity of reading as it were in a mirror the characteristic pretensions and the average success of many celebrated schools. Such a mirror I found in the ordinary conversation and in the favourite reading of young gownsmen belonging to the many different colleges of Oxford. Generally speaking, each college had a filial connexion (strict! or not strict) with some one or more of our great public schools. These, fortunately for England, are diffused through all her counties: and, as the main appointments to the capital offices in such pud/ic schools are often vested by law in Oxford or Cambridge, this arrangement guarantees a sound stituted for Grotius, as the Sunday evening lecture-book, Dr. Clarke’s Commentary on the New Testament. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’; and in that way only can I account for my own neglect to clear up the question. Or perhaps, after all, I did clear it up, and in a long life-march subsequently may have dropped it by the wayside. 1 * Strict or not strict’ :—In some colleges the claims of a/umni from certain schools were absolute ; in some, I believe, conditional; in others, again, concurrent with rival claims from favoured schools or favoured counties. 46 CONFESSIONS OF system of teaching ; so that any failures in the result must presumably be due to the individual student. Failures, on the whole, I do not suppose that there were. Classical attainments that might be styled even splendid were not then, nor are now, uncommon. And yet in one great feature many of those schools, even the very best, when thus tried by their fruits, left a painful memento of failure ; or rather not of failure as in relation to any purpose that they steadily recognised, but of wilful and intentional disregard, as towards a purpose alien from any duty of theirs, or any task which they had ever undertaken—a failure, namely, in relation to modern literature—a neglect to unroll its mighty charts: and amongst this modern literature a special neglect (such as seems almost brutal) of our own English literature, though pleading its patent of precedency in a voice so trumpet-tongued. To myself, whose homage ascended night and day towards the great altars of English Poetry or Eloquence, it was shocking and revolting to find in high-minded young countrymen, burning with sensibility that sought vainly for a correspond- ing object, deep unconsciousness of an all-sufficient object —namely, in that great inheritance of our literature which sometimes kindled enthusiasm in our public enemies. How painful to see or to know that vast revelations of grandeur and beauty are wasting themselves for ever-— forests teeming with gorgeous life, floral wildernesses hidden inaccessibly ; whilst, at the same time, in contra-position to that evil, behold a corresponding evil—viz., that with equal prodigality the great capacities of enjoyment are running also to waste, and are everywhere burning out unexercised— waste, in short, in the world of things enjoyable, balanced by an equal waste in the organs and the machineries of enjoyment! This picture—would it not fret the heart of an Englishman? Some years (say twenty) after the era of my own entrance at that Oxford which then furnished me with records so painful of slight regard to our national literature, behold at the court of London a French ambassador, a man of genius blazing (as some people thought) with nationality, but, in fact, AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 47 with something inexpressibly nobler and deeper—viz., patriotism. For true and unaffected patriotism will show its love in a noble form by sincerity and truth. But nationality, as I have always found, is mean ; is dishonest ; is ungenerous; is incapable of candour; and, being continually besieged with temptations to falsehood, too often ends by becoming habitually mendacious. This Frenchman above all things valued literature: his own trophies of distinction were all won upon that field: and yet, when called upon to review the literature of Europe, he found himself conscientiously coerced into making his work a mere monument to the glory of one man, and that man the son of a hostile land. The name of Milton, in his estimate, swallowed up all others. This Frenchman was Chateaubriand.. The personal splendour which sur- rounded him gave a corresponding splendour to his act. And, because he, as an ambassador, was a representative man, this act might be interpreted as a representative act. The tutelary genius of France in this instance might be regarded as bending before that of England. But homage so free, homage so noble, must be interpreted and received in a corresponding spirit of generosity. It was not, like the testimony of Balaam on behalf of Israel, an unwilling submission to a hateful truth: it was a concession, in the spirit. of saintly magnanimity, to an interest of human nature that as such, transcended by many degrees all considerations merely national. Now, then, with this unlimited devotion to one great luminary of our literary system emblazoned so conspicu- ously in the testimony of a Frenchman—that is, of one trained, and privileged to be a public enemy—contrast. the humiliating spectacle of young Englishmen suffered (so far as their training is concerned) to ignore the very existence of this mighty poet. Do I mean, then, that it would have been advisable to place the Paradise Lost, and the Paradise Regained, and the Samson, in the library of schoolboys? By no means. That mode of sensibility which deals with the Miltonic sublimity is rarely developed in boyhood. And these divine works should in prudence 48 CONFESSIONS OF be reserved to the period of mature manhood. But then it should be made known’ that they are so reserved, and upon what principle of reverential regard for the poet himself. In the meantime, selections from Milton, from Dryden, from Pope, and many other writers, though not everywhere appreciable by those who have but small experience of life, would not generally transcend the intel- lect or sensibility of a boy sixteen or seventeen years old. And, beyond all other sections of literature, the two which I am going to mention are fitted (or might be fitted by skilful management) to engage the interest of those who are no longer boys, but have reached the age which is presumable in English university matriculation—viz., the close of the eighteenth year. Search through all languages, from Benares the mystical, and the banks of the Ganges, travelling westwards to the fountains of the Hudson, I deny that any two such Jibliothece for engaging youthful interest could be brought together as these two which follow :— First, In contradiction to M. Cousin’s recent audacious assertion (redeemed from the suspicion of mendacity simply by the extremity of ignorance on which it reposes) that we English have no tolerable writer of prose subsequent to Lord Bacon, it so happens that the seventeenth century, and specially that part of it concerned in this case—viz., the latter seventy years (a.p. 1628-1700)—produced the highest efforts of eloquence (philosophic, but at the same time rhetorical and impassioned, in a degree unknown to the prose literature of France) which our literature pos- sesses, and not a line of it but is posterior to the death of Lord Bacon. Donne, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, Barrow, form a pleiad, a constellation of seven golden stars, such as no literature can match in their own class. From these seven writers, taken apart from all their contemporaries, I would under- take to build up an entire body of philosophy? upon the 1 ¢ Philosophy’ :—At this point it is that the main misconception would arise. ‘Theology, and not philosophy, most people will fancy, is likely to form the staple of these writers, But I have elsewhere Th heeees AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 49 supreme interests of humanity. One error of M. Cousin’s doubtless lay in overlooking the fact that all conceivable problems of philosophy can reproduce themselves under a theological mask: and thus he had absolved himself from reading many English books, as presumably mere professional pleadings of Protestant polemics, which are in fact mines inexhaustible of eloquence and philosophic speculation. Secondly, A full abstract of the English Drama from about the year 1580 to the period (say 1635) at which it was killed by the frost of the Puritanical spirit seasoning all flesh for the Parliamentary War. No literature, not excepting even that of Athens, has ever presented such a multiform theatre, such a carnival display, mask and anti-mask, of impassioned life—breathing, moving, acting, suffering, laughing. Quicquid agunt homines—votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus ;1! —all this, but far more truly and adequately than was or could be effected in that field of composition which the gloomy satirist contemplated, whatsoever in fact our medieval ancestors exhibited in their ‘Dance of Death,’ drunk with tears and laughter,—may here be reviewed, scenically grouped, draped, and gorgeously coloured. - What other national drama can pretend to any competition with this? The Athenian has in a great proportion perished ; the Roman was killed prematurely by the bloody realities of the amphitheatre, as candle-light by day-light ; the Spanish, even in the hands of Calderon, offers only undeveloped sketchings; and the French, maintained that the main bulk of English philosophy has always hidden itself in the English divinity. In Jeremy Taylor, tor instance, are exhibited all the practical aspects of philosophy ; of philosophy as it bears upon Life, upon Ethics, and upon Transcendent Prudence—i.e. briefly upon the Greek summum bonum. 1 “All that is done by men-——movements of prayer, panic, wrath, revels of the voluptuous, festivals of triumph, or gladiatorship of the intellect ’— Fuvenal, in the prefatory lines which rehearse the prevailing themes of his own Satires gathered in the great harvests of Rome, E 50 CONFESSIONS OF besides other and profounder objections, to which no justice had yet been done, lies under the signal disadvantage of not having reached its meridian until sixty years (or two generations) after the English. In reality, the great period of the English Drama was exactly closing as the French opened!: consequently the French lost the prodigious advantage for scenical effects of a romantic and picturesque age. This had vanished when the French theatre culminated ; and the natural result was that the fastidiousness of French taste, by this time too powerfully developed, stifled or distorted the free movements of French genius. I beg the reader’s pardon for this disproportioned _ digression, into which I was hurried by my love for our great national literature, my anxiety to see it amongst _ educational. resources invested with a ministerial agency of far amplercharacter, but at all events to lodge a < protest against..that..wholesale neglect of our supreme authors which leaves us open to the stinging reproach of ‘treading daily with our clouted shoon’ (to borrow the words of Comus) upon that which high-minded foreigners regard as the one paramount jewel in our national diadem. 1 It is remarkable that in the period immediately anterior to that of Corneille, a stronger and more 4ving nature was struggling for utterance in French tragedy. Guizot has cited from an early drama (I forget whether of Rotrou or of Hardy) one scene most thoroughly impassioned, The situation is that of a prince who has fixed his love upon a girl of low birth. She is faithful and constant: but the courtiers about the prince, for malicious purposes of their own, calumniate her: the prince is deluded by the plausible air of the slanders which they disperse: he believes them; but not with the result (anticipated by the courtiers) of dismissing the girl from his thoughts. On the contrary, he is haunted all the more morbidly by her image ; and, in a scene which brings before us one of the vilest amongst these slanderers exerting himself to the uttermost in drawing off the prince’s thoughts to alien objects, we find the prince vainly attempting any self-control, vainly striving to attend, till he is overruled by the tenderness of his sorrowing love into finding new occasions for awakening thoughts of the lost girl in the very words chiefly relied on for calling off his feelings from her image. The scene (as Guizot himself remarks) is thoroughly Shaksperian ; and I venture to think that this judgment would have been countersigned by Charles Lamb, ee AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 51 That reproach fell heavily, as my own limited experi- ence inclined me to fear, upon most of our great public schools, otherwise so admirably conducted.1. But from the Manchester Grammar School any such reproach altogether rebounded. My very first conversation with the boys had arisen naturally upon a casual topic, and had shown them to be tolerably familiar with the out- line of the Christian polemics in the warfare with Jew, Mahometan, Infidel, and Sceptic. But this was an exceptional case; and naturally it happened that most of us sought for the ordinary subjects of our conversa- tional discussions in hiterature—viz., in our own native literature. Here it was that I learned to feel a deep respect for my new school-fellows : deep it was, then; and a larger experience has made it deeper. I have since known many literary men; men whose profession was literature; who were understood to have dedicated them- selves to literature; and who sometimes had with some one special section or little nook of literature an acquaint- ance critically minute. But amongst such men I have found but three or four who had a knowledge which came as near to what I should consider a comprehensive knowledge as really existed amongst those boys collect- ively. What one boy had not, another had; and thus, by continual intercourse, the fragmentary contribution of one being integrated by the fragmentary contributions of others, gradually the attainments of each separate individual became, in some degree, the collective attain- ments of the whole senior common room. It js true, undoubtedly, that some parts of literature were inaccess- ible, simply because the books were inaccessible to boys at school—for instance, Froissart in the old translation by Lord Berners, now more than three centuries old; and some parts were, to the young, essentially repulsive. 1 It will strike everybody that such works as the Microcosm, con- ducted notoriously by Eton boys, and therefore, in part, by Canning as one of their leaders at that period, must have an admirable effect, since not only it must have made it the interest of each contributor, but must even have made it his necessity, to cultivate some acquaint- ance with his native literature. 52 CONFESSIONS OF But, measuring the general qualifications by that standard which I have since found to prevail amongst professional littérateurs, 1 felt more respectfully towards the majority of my senior school-fellows than ever I had fancied it possible that I should find occasion to feel towards any boys whatever. My intercourse with those amongst them who had any conversational talents greatly stimulated my intellect. This intercourse, however, fell within narrower limits soon after the time of my entrance. I acknowledge, with deep self-reproach, that_every possible indulgence was allowed to me which the circumstances of the establish- ment made possible. I had, for example, a private room allowed, in which I not only studied, but also slept at night. The room being airy and cheerful, I found nothing disagreeable in this double use of it. Naturally, however, this means of retirement tended to sequester me from my companions: for, whilst liking the society of some amongst them, I. also had a deadly liking (perhaps a morbid liking) for solitude. To make my present solitude the more fascinating, my mother sent me five guineas exéra, for the purchase of an admission to the Manchester Library; a library which I. should not at present think very extensive, but which, however, benefited in its composition, as also in its administration, by the good sense and intelligence of some amongst its original committees. These two luxuries were truly and indeed such: but a third, from which I had _ anticipated even greater pleasure, turned out a total failure; and for a reason which it may be useful to mention, by way of caution to others. ‘This was a pianoforte, together with the sum required for regular lessons from a music-master. But the first discovery I made was that practice through eight or even ten hours a day was indispensable towards any great proficiency on this instrument. Another dis- covery finished my disenchantment: it was this. For the particular purpose which I had in view, it became clear that no mastery of the instrument, not even that of Thalberg, would be available. Too soon I became aware ag i , Tort epee AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 53 that to the deep voluptuous enjoyment of music absolute passiveness in the hearer is indispensable. Gain what skill you please, nevertheless activity, vigilance, anxiety must always accompany an elaborate effort of musical execution: and so. far is that from. being. reconcilable with the entrancement and lull essential to the true fruition of music, that, even if you should suppose a vast piece of mechanism capable of executing a whole oratorio, but requiring, at intervals, a co-operating impulse from the foot of the auditor, even that, even so much as an occasional touch of the foot, would utterly undermine all your pleasure. A single psychological discovery, therefore, caused my musical anticipations to evanesce. Consequently, one of my luxuries burst like a bubble at an early stage. In this state of things, when the instrument had turned out a bubble, it followed naturally that the music-master should find himself to be a bubble. But he was so thoroughly good-natured and agreeable that I could not reconcile myself to such a catastrophe. Meantime, though accommodating within certain limits, this music-master was yet a conscientious man, and a man of honourable pride. On finding, there- fore, that I was not seriously making any effort to improve, he shook hands with me one fine day, and took his leave for ever. Unless it were to point a moral and adorn a tale, the piano had then become useless. It was too big to hang upon willows, and willows there were none in that neighbourhood. But it remained for months as¢a lumbering monument of labour misapplied, of bubbles that had burst, and of musical’“visions that, under psychological .tests, had foundered for ever. Yes, certainly, this particular luxury—one out of three —had proved a bubble; too surely this had foundered ; but not, therefore, the other two. The quiet study, lifted by two storeys above the vapours of earth, and liable to no unseasonable intrusion; the Manchester Library, so judiciously and symmetrically mounted in all its most attractive departments—no class dispro- 54 CONFESSIONS OF portioned to the rest: these were no bubbles; these had not foundered. Oh, wherefore, then, was it—through what inexplicable growth of(evil in myself or in others— that now in the summer of 1802, when. peace was” brooding over all the land, peace succeeding to a bloody seven years’ war, but peace which already gave signs of breaking into a far bloodier war, some dark sympathising movement within my own heart, as if echoing and repeat- ing in mimicry the political menaces of the earth, swept with storm-clouds across that otherwise serene and radiant dawn which should have heralded my approaching entrance into life? Inexplicable 1 have allowed myself to call this fatal error in my life, because such it must appear to others; since, even to myself, so often as I fail to realise the case by reproducing a reflex impression in kind, and in degree, of the suffering before which my better angel gave way—yes, even to myself this collapse of my resisting energies seems inexplicable.. Yet again, in simple truth, now that it becomes possible, through changes worked by time, to tell the whole truth (and not, as in former editions, only a part of it), there really was no absolute mystery at all. But this case, in common with many others, exemplifies to my mind the mere impossibility of making full. and. frank ‘ Confessions,’ whilst many of the persons concerned in. the incidents are themselves surviving, or (which is worse still) if themselves dead and buried, are yet vicariously surviving in the persons of near and loving kinsmen. Rather than inflict mortifications upon people so circumstanced, any kind-hearted man will choose to mutilate his narra- tive; will suppress facts, and will mystify explanations. For instance, at this point in my record, it has become my right, perhaps I might say my duty, to call a particular medical man of the penultimate generation a blockhead ; nay, doubtfully, to call him a criminal block- head. But could I do this without deep compunction, so long as sons and daughters of his were still living, from whom I, when a boy, had received most hospitable attentions? Often, on the very same day which brought 4 i M | AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER home to my suffering convictions the. atrocious ignorance of papa, I was benefiting by the courtesies of the daughters, and by the scientific accomplishments of the son. Not the less this man, at that particular moment when a crisis of gloom was gathering over my path, became effectually my eyil genius. Not. that singly perhaps he could have worked any durable amount of mischief: but he, as a.co-operator. unconsciously with others, sealed and ratified that sentence of stormy sorrow then hanging over my head. Three separate persons, in fact, made themselves unintentional accomplices in that ruin (a ruin reaching me even at this day by its shadows) which threw me out a homeless vagrant upon the earth before I had accomplished my seventeenth year. Of these three persons, foremost.came myself, through my wilful despair and resolute abjuration of all secondary hope: since, after all, some mitigation was. possible, supposing that perfect relief might. not be possible. Secondly, came that medical rufhan through whose brutal ignorance it happened that my malady had not been arrested before reaching an advanced stage. Thirdly, came Mr. Lawson, through whose growing infirmities it had arisen that this malady ever reached its very earliest stage. Strange it was, but not the less a fact, that Mr. Lawson was gradually becoming a curse. to all who fell under his influence, through pure zealotry of conscien- tiousness. Being a worse man, he would have carried far deeper blessings into his circle. If he could have reconciled himself to an imperfect discharge of his duties, he would not have betrayed his insufficiency for those duties. But this he would not hear of. He persisted in travelling over the appointed course to the last inch. and the consequences told most painfully upon the com- fort of all around him. By the old traditionary usages of the school, going in at seven A.M., We ought to have been dismissed for breakfast and a full hour’s repose at nine. This hour of rest was in strict justice a debi to the students—liable to no discount either through the caprice or the tardiness of the supreme master. Yet such were CONFESSIONS OF the gradual encroachments upon this hour that at length the bells of the collegiate church,—which, by an ancient usage, rang every morning from half-past nine to ten, and through varying modifications of musical key and rhythmus that marked the advancing stages of the half- hour,—regularly announced to us, on issuing from the school-room, that the bread and milk which composed our simple breakfast must be despatched at a pace fitter for the fowls of the air than students of Grecian philosophy. But was no compensatory encroachment for our benefit allowed upon the next hour from ten to eleven? Not for so much as the fraction of a second. Inexorably as the bells, by stopping, announced the hour of ten, was Mr. Lawson to be seen ascending the steps of the school; and he that suffered most by this rigorous exaction of duties could not allese that Mr. Lawson suffered less. If he required others to pay, he also paid up to the last farthing. The same derangement took place, with the same refusal to benefit by any indemnifi- cation, at what should have been the two-hours’ pause for dinner. Only for some mysterious reason, resting possibly upon the family arrangements of the day- scholars,—which, if once violated, might have provoked a rebellion of fathers and mothers,—he still adhered faithfully to five o’clock p.m. as the closing hour of the day’s labours. Here then stood arrayed the whole machinery of mischief in good working order ; and through six months or more, allowing for one short respite of four weeks, this machinery had been operating with effect. Mr. Lawson, to begin, had (without meaning it, or so much as perceiving it) barred up all avenues from morning to night through which any bodily exercise could be obtained. Two or three chance intervals of five minutes each, and even these not consecutively arranged, composed the whole available fund of leisure out of which any stroll into the country could have been attempted. But in a great city like Manchester the very suburbs had hardly been reached before that little fraction of time was exhausted. Very AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 57 soon after Mr. Lawson’s increasing infirmities had begun to tell severely in the contraction of our spare time, the change showed itself powerfully in my drooping health. Gradually the\Jiver became affected : and connected with that affection arose, what often accompanies such ailments, profound melancholy. In such circumstances, indeed under any the slightest disturbance of my health, I had authority from my guardians to call for medical advice: but I was not left to my own discretion in selecting the adviser. This person was not a physician, who would of course have expected the ordinary fee of a guinea for every visit ; nor a surgeon; but simply an apothecary. In any case of serious illness a physician would have been called in. But a less costly style of advice was reasonably held to be sufficient in any illness which left the patient strength sufficient to walk about. Certainly it ought to have been sufficient here: for no case could possibly be simpler. Three doses of calomel or blue pill, which unhappily I did not then know, would no doubt have re-established me in a week. But far better, as acting always upon me with a magical celerity and a magical certainty, would have been the authoritative prescription (privately notified to Mr. Lawson) of seventy miles’ walking in each week. Un- happily my professional adviser was a comatose old gentle- man, rich beyond all his needs, careless of his own practice, and standing under that painful necessity (according to the custom then regulating medical practice, which prohibited fees to apothecaries) of seeking his remuneration in ex- cessive deluges of medicine. Me, however, out of pure idleness, he forbore to plague with any variety of medicines. With sublime simplicity he confined himself to one horrid mixture, that must have suggested itself. to him when prescribing for a tiger. In ordinary circumstances, and with plenty of exercise, no creature could be healthier than myself. But my organisation was perilously frail. And to fight simultaneously with such a malady and such a medicine seemed really too much. The proverb tells us that. three <‘flittings’ are as bad asa fire. Very possibly. And I should think that, in the same 58 CONFESSIONS OF spirit of reasonable equation, three such tiger-drenches must be equal to one apoplectic fit, or even to the tiger himself. Having taken two of them, which struck me as quite enough for one life, I declined to comply with the injunction of the label pasted upon each several phial— viz., Repetatur haustus ;1 and, instead of doing any such dangerous thing, called upon Mr. (the apothecary), begging to know if his art had not amongst its reputed infinity of resources any less abominable, and less shatter- ing to a delicate system than this. ‘None whatever,’ he replied. Exceedingly kind he was; insisted on my drinking tea with his really amiable daughters; but continued at intervals to repeat ‘None whatever — none whatever’; then, as if rousing himself to an effort, he sang out loudly ‘None whatever,’ which in this final utterance he toned down syllabically into ‘ whatever—ever—ver— er. The whole wit of man, it seems, had exhausted itself upon the preparation of that one infernal mixture. Now . then. .we. three—Mr...Lawson,.the somnolent apothecary, and myself—had amongst us accomplished a climax of perplexity. _Mr. Lawson, by mere dint of conscientiousness,. had. made health for me impossible. The apothecary had subscribed Ais little contribution, by ratifying and trebling the ruinous effects of this sedentari- ness. And for myself, as last in the series, it now remained to clench the operation by my own little con- tribution, all that I really had to offer—viz., absolute despair. Those who have ever suffered from a profound derangement of the liver may happen to know that of human despondencies through all their infinite gamut none is more deadly. Hope died within me. I could not look for medical relief, so deep being my own ignorance, so equally deep being that of my official counsellor. I could not expect that Mr. Lawson would modify his system— his instincts of duty being so strong, his incapacity to face that duty so steadily increasing. ‘It comes then to this,’ thought I, ‘that in myself only there lurks any arrear of help’: as always for every man the ultimate reliance 1 ‘Let the draught be repeated.’ AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 59 should be on himself. But this se/f ot mine seemed absolutely bankrupt ; bankrupt of counsel or device—of effort in the way of action, or of suggestion in the way of plan. I had for two months been _pur- suing with one of my guardians what I meant for a negotiation upon this subject ; the main object being to obtain some considerable abbreviation of my school resi- dence. But negotiation was a self-flattering name for such a correspondence, since there never had been from the beginning any the slightest leaning on my guardian’s part towards the shadow or pretence of a compromise. What compromise, indeed, was possible where neither party could concede a part, however small: the whole must be con- ceded, or nothing: since no mezzo termine was conceiv- able. In reality, when my eyes first glanced upon that disagreeable truth—that no opening offered for reciprocal concession, that the concession must all be on one side— naturally it struck me that no guardian could be expected to do shat. At the same moment it also struck me that my guardian had all along never for a moment been arguing with a view to any practical result, but simply in the hope that he might win over my assent to the reason- ableness of what, reasonable or not, was settled immovably. These sudden discoveries, flashing upon me simultaneously, were quite sufficient to put a summary close to the corre- spondence. And I saw also, which strangely had escaped me till this general revelation of disappointments, that any individual guardian—even if he had been disposed to concession—was but one after all amongst five. Well: this amongst the general blackness really brought a gleam of comfort. If the whole object-on-which I had spent so much excellent paper and midnight tallow (I am ashamed to .use.so vile.a word, and yet truth forbids me to say oi/), if this would have been so nearly worthless when gained, then it became a kind of pleasure to have lost it. All considerations united now in urging me to waste no more of either rhetoric, tallow,.or logic, upon my impassive granite block of a guardian. Indeed, I suspected, on reviewing his last communication, that he had just reached 60 CONFESSIONS OF the last inch of his patience, or (in nautical diction) had ‘paid out’ the entire cable by which he swung ; so that, if I, acting on the apothecary’s precedent of ‘ repetatur haustus, had endeavoured to administer another bolus or draught of expostulation, he would have followed my course as to the tiger-drench, in applying his potential No to any such audacious attempt. To my guardian, mean- time, I owe this justice—that, over and above the absence on-my side of any arguments wearing even a colourable strength (for to him the suffering from biliousness must have been a mere word), he had the following weighty consideration to offer, ‘which even this foolish boy’ (to himself he would say) ‘ will think material some three years ahead.’ My patrimonial income, at the moment of my father’s death, like that of all my brothers (then three), was exactly {150 per annum.’ Now, according to the current belief, or boldly, one might say, according to the avowed traditional maxim throughout England, such an income was too little for an under-graduate, keeping his four terms annually at Oxford or Cambridge. Too little —by how much? By £50: the adequate income being set down at just £200. Consequently the precise sum by which my income was supposed (falsely supposed, as sub- sequently my own experience convinced me) to fall short of the income needed for Oxford, was that very sum which the funds of the Manchester Grammar School allocated to every student resident for a period of three years; and allocated not merely through a corresponding period of three years, but of seven years. Strong should have been the reasons that could neutralise such overwhelming pleadings of just and honourable prudence for submitting to the further residence required. O reader, urge not the crying arguments that spoke so tumultuously against me. Too sorrowfully I feel them. Out of thirty-six months’ 1 £150 per annum’ :—Why in a long minority of more than fourteen years this was not improved, I never could learn. Nobody was open to any suspicion of positive embezzlement : and yet this case must be added to the other cases of passive neglects and negative injuries which so extensively disfigure the representative picture of guardianship all over Christendom. AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 61 residence required, I had actually completed nineteen—+.¢. the better half. Still, on the other hand, it is true that my sufferings were almost insupportable ; and, but for the blind unconscious conspiracy of two persons, these suffer- ings would either (1) never have existed, or (2) would have been instantly relieved. In a great city like Man- chester lay, probably, a ship-load of that same mercury which, by one fragment, not so large as an acorn, would have changed the colour of a human life, or would have intercepted the heavy funeral knell—heavy, though it may be partially muffled—of his own fierce self-reproaches. But now, at last, came over me, from the mere excess of bodily suffering and mental disappointments, a frantic and rapturous re-agency. In the United States the case is well known, and many times has been described by travellers, of that furious instinct which, under a secret call for saline variations of diet, drives all the tribes of buffaloes for thousands of miles to the common centre of the ‘Salt-licks.’ Under such a compulsion does the locust, under such a compulsion does the leeming, traverse its mysterious path. They are deaf to danger, deaf to the cry of battle, deaf to the trumpets of death. Let the sea cross their path, let armies with artillery bar the road, even these terrific powers can arrest only by destroying ; and the most frightful abysses, up to the very last menace of engulfment, up to the very instant of absorption, have no power to alter or retard the line of their inexorable advance. Such an instinct) it was, such a rapturous command— even so potent, and alas! even so blind—that, under the whirl of tumultuous indignation and of new-born “hope, suddenly transfigured my whole being. In the twinkling of an eye, I came to an adamantine resolution—not as if issuing from any act or any choice of my own, but as if passively received from some dark oracular legislation external to myself. That I would elope from Manchester —this was the resolution. 4dscond would have been the word, if I had meditated anything criminal. But whence came the indignation, and the hope? The indignation 62 CONFESSIONS OF arose naturally against my three tormentors (guardian, Archididascalus, and the professor of tigrology) for those who do substantially co-operate to one result, however little designing it, unavoidably the mind unifies as a hostile confederacy. But the hope—how shall I explain that? Was it the first-born of the resolution, or was the resolu- tion the first-born of the hope?) Indivisibly they went together, like thunder and lightning; or each inter- changeably ran before and after the other. Under that transcendent rapture which the prospect of sudden libera- tion let loose, all that natural anxiety which should other- wise have interlinked itself with my anticipations was actually drowned in the blaze of joy, as the light of the planet Mercury is lost and confounded on sinking too far within the blaze of the solar beams. Practically I felt no care at all stretching beyond two or three weeks. Not as being heedless and improvident; my tendencies lay generally in the other direction. No; the cause lurked in what ‘Wordsworth, when describing the festal state of France during the happy morning-tide of her First Revolu- tion (1788-1790), calls ‘she senselessness of joy’: this it was, joy — headlong — frantic — irreflective—and (as Wordsworth truly calls it), for that very reason, sublime! —which swallowed up all capacities of rankling care or heart-corroding doubt. I was, I had been long, a captive: I was in a house of bondage : one fulminating word— Let there be freedom—spoken from some hidden recess in my own will, had as by an earthquake rent asunder my prison gates. At any minute I could walk out. Already I trod by anticipation the sweet pastoral hills, already I breathed gales of the everlasting mountains, that to my feelings blew from the garden of Paradise; and in that vestibule of an earthly heaven it was no more possible for me to see vividly or in any lingering detail the thorny cares which might hereafter multiply around me than amongst the 1 * The senselessness of joy was then sublime’—Wordsworth at Calais in 1802 (see his sonnets), looking back through thirteen years to the great era of social resurrection, in 1788-89, from a sleep of ten centuries, AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 63 | . roses of June, and on the loveliest of June mornings, I if _ could--gather~ depression from the glooms of the last | ' December. 1 To go was settled. But when and whither? When could have but one answer ; for on more reasons than one I needed summer weather, and as much of it as possible. | Besides that, when August came, it would bring along Ht with it my own birth-day : now, one codicil in my general vow of freedom had been that my seventeenth birth-day | 4 should not find me at school. Still I needed some trifle of preparation. Especially I needed alittle money. I wrote, 4 therefore, to the only confidential friend that I had—viz., \, Lady Carbery. Originally, as early friends of my mother’s, both she and Lord Carbery had distinguished me at Bath ] and elsewhere, for some years, by flattering attentions ; and, for the last three years in particular, Lady Carbery, a young woman some ten years older than myself, and who was as remarkable for her intellectual pretensions as she was for her beauty and her benevolence, had maintained a correspondence with me upon questions of literature. She thought too highly of my powers and 1A] attainments, and everywhere spoke of me with an enthu- i siasm that, if I had been five or six years older, and had possessed any personal advantages, might have raised 1, smiles at her expense. To her I now wrote, requesting ; the loan of five guineas. A whole week passed without ) any answer. This perplexed and made me uneasy : for her ladyship was rich by a vast fortune removed entirely from her husband’s control ; and, as I felt assured, would have cheerfully sent me twenty times the sum asked, unless her sagacity had suggested some suspicion (which seemed . impossible) of the real purposes which I contemplated in | the employment of the five guineas. Could I incautiously hb have said anything in my own letter tending that way? ie Certainly not; then why But at that moment my a Cr A IR me me ; seal. It was from Lady Carbery, of course, and enclosed 1 | ten guineas instead of five. Slow in those days were the ; mails ; besides which, Lady Carbery happened to be down i speculations were cut short by a letter bearing a coroneted 1 64 CONFESSIONS OF at the seaside, whither my letter had been sent after her. Now, then, including my own pocket-money, I possessed a dozen guineas; which seemed sufficient for my im- mediate purpose; and all ulterior emergencies, as the reader understands, I trampled under foot. This sum, however, spent at inns on the most economic footing, could not have held out for much above a calendar month; and, as to the plan of selecting secondary inns, these are not always cheaper; but the main objection is that in the solitary stations amongst the mountains (Cambrian no less than Cumbrian) there is often no choice to be found : the high-priced inn is the only one. Even this dozen of guineas it became necessary to diminish by three. The age of ‘vails’ and perquisites to three or four servants at any gentleman’s house where you dined—this age, it is true, had passed away by thirty years perhaps. But that flagrant abuse had no connexion at all with the English custom of distributing money amongst that part of the domestics whose daily labours may have been increased by a visitor’s residence in the family for some considerable space of time. This custom (almost peculiar, I believe, to the English gentry) is honourable and just. I personally had been trained by my mother, who detested sordid habits, to look upon it as ignominious in a gentleman to leave a household without acknowledging the obliging services of those who cannot openly remind him of their claims. On this occasion, mere necessity compelled me to overlook the housekeeper : for to her I could not have offered less than two or three guineas ; and, as she was a fixture, I reflected that I might send it at some future period. To three inferior servants I found that I ought not to give less than one guinea each: so much, therefore, I left in the hands of G , the most honourable and upright of boys; since to have given it myself would have been prematurely to publish my purpose. These three guineas deducted, I still had nine, or thereabouts, And now all things were settled, except one: the when was settled, and the how ; but not the whither. That was still sub judice. My plan originally had been to travel northwards— AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 65 viz., to the region of the English Lakes. That little mountainous district, lying stretched like a pavilion between four well-known points—viz., the small towns of Ulverstone and Penrith as its two poles, south and north ; between Kendal, again, on the east, and Egremont on the west—measuring on the one diameter about forty miles, and on the other perhaps thirty-five—had for me a secret fascination, subtle, sweet, fantastic, and even from my seventh or eighth year spiritually strong. The southern section of that district, about eighteen or twenty miles long, which bears the name of Furness, figures in the eccentric geography of English law as a section of Lancashire, though separated from that county by the estuary of Morecambe Bay : and therefore, as Lancashire happened to be my own native county, I had from childhood, on the strength of this mere legal fiction, cherished as a mystic privilege, slender as a filament of air, some fraction of denizenship in the fairy little domain of the English Lakes. ‘The major part of these lakes lies in Westmore- land and Cumberland : but the sweet reposing little water of Esthwaite, with its few emerald fields, and the grander one of Coniston, with the sublime cluster of mountain groups, and the little network of quiet dells lurking about its head? all the way back to Grasmere, lie in or near the upper chamber of Furness; and all these, together with 1 ¢Jts head’ :—That end of a lake which receives the rivulets and brooks feeding its waters is locally called its Aead; and, in con- tinuation of the same constructive image, the counter terminus, which discharges its surplus water, is called its foot. By the way, asa sugges- tion from this obvious distinction, I may remark that in all cases the very existence of a head and foot to any sheet of water defeats the malice of Lord Byron’s sneer against the Lake Poets, in calling them by the contemptuous designation of ‘pond poets’ ; a variation which some part of the public readily caught up as a natural reverberation of that spitefulness, so petty and apparently so groundless, which notoriously Lord Byron cherished against Wordsworth steadily, and more fitfully against Southey. The effect of transforming a living image—an image of restless motion—into an image of foul stagnation was tangibly apprehensible, But was it that contradistinguished the ‘vivid Jacus’ of Virgil from rotting ponds mantled with verdant slime? To have, or not to have, a head and a foot (i.e. a principle of perpetual change) is at the very heart of this distinction ; and to substitute for /eke a term which F 66 CONFESSIONS OF the ruins of the once glorious abbey, had been brought out not many years before into sunny splendour by the great enchantress of that generation—Anne Radcliffe. But more even than Anne Radcliffe had the landscape painters, so many and so various, contributed to the glorification of the English lake district; drawing out and impressing upon the heart the sanctity of repose in its shy recesses— its alpine grandeurs in such passes as those of Wastdale- head, Langdale-head, Borrowdale, Kirkstone, Hawsdale, etc., together with the monastic peace which seems to brood over its peculiar form of pastoral life, so much nobler (as Wordsworth notices) in its stern simplicity and continual conflict with danger hidden in the vast draperies of mist overshadowing the hills, and amongst the armies of snow and hail arrayed by fierce northern winters, than the effeminate shepherd’s life in the classical Arcadia, or in the flowery pastures of Sicily. Amongst these attractions that drew me so strongly to the Lakes, there had also by that time arisen in this lovely region the deep deep magnet (as to me on/y in all this world it then was)-of William Wordsworth. Inevitably this close connexion of the poetry which most of all had moved me with the particular region and scenery that most of all had fastened upon my affections, and led captive my imagination, was calculated, under ordinary circum- stances, -to-impress upon my fluctuating deliberations a summary and decisive bias. But the very depth of the im- pressions which had been made upon me, either as regarded the poetry or the scenery, was too solemn and (unaffectedly I may say it) too spiritual, to clothe itself in any hasty or chance movement as at all adequately expressing its strength, or reflecting its hallowed character. If you, reader, were a devout Mahometan, throwing gazes of mystical awe daily towards Mecca, or were a Christian devotee looking with the same rapt adoration to St. Peter’s at Rome, or to El Kodah, the Holy City of Jerusalem (so called even amongst the Arabs, who hate both Christian ignores and negatives the very differential principle that constitutes a lake—viz., its current and its eternal mobility—is to offer an insult in which the insulted party has no interest or concern. AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 67 and Jew)—how painfully would it jar upon your sensi- bilities if some friend, sweeping past you upon a high road, with a train (according to the circumstances) of drome- daries or of wheel carriages, should suddenly pull up, and say, ‘Come, old fellow, jump up alongside of me ; I’m off for the Red Sea, and here’s a spare dromedary,’ or ‘ Off for Rome, and here’s a well-cushioned barouche.’ Season- ) able and convenient it might happen that the invitation ; were ; but still it would shock you that a journey which, with or without your consent, could not ut assume the | character eventually of a saintly pilgrimage, should arise | and take its initial movement upon a casual summons, or upon a vulgar opening of momentary convenience. In the present case, under no circumstances should I have dreamed of presenting myself to Wordsworth. The | principle of ‘veneration’ (to speak phrenologically) was | by many degrees too strong in me for any such overture on my part. Hardly could I have found the courage to | meet and to answer such an overture coming from him. I could not even tolerate the prospect (as a bare possibility) of Wordsworth’s hearing my name first of all associated ) with some case of pecuniary embarrassment. And, apart | from all thas, it vulgarised the whole ‘interest’ (no other term can I find to express the case collectively)—the whole ‘interest’ of poetry and the enchanted land—equally it vulgarised person and thing, the vineyard and the vintage, the gardens and the ladies, of the Hesperides, together . with all their golden fruitage, if I should rush upon them | in a hurried and thoughtless state of excitement. I re- | | membered the fine caution on this subject involved in a ; tradition preserved by Pausanias. Those (he tells us) who visited by night the great field of Marathon (where at certain times phantom cavalry careered, flying and pur- suing) in a temper of vulgar sight-seeking, and under no higher impulse than the degrading one of curiosity, were met and punished severely in the dark, by the same sort of people, I presume, as those who handled Falstaff so roughly in the venerable shades of Windsor: whilst loyal visitors, who came bringing a true and filial sympathy with 68 CONFESSIONS OF the grand deeds of their Athenian ancestors, who came as children of the same hearth, met with the most gracious acceptance, and fulfilled all the purposes of a pilgrimage or sacred mission. Under my present circumstances, I saw that the very motives of love and honour, which would have inclined the scale so powerfully in favour of the northern lakes, were exactly those which drew most heavily in the other direction—the circumstances being what they were as to hurry and perplexity. And just at that moment suddenly unveiled itself another powerful motive against taking the northern direction—viz., consideration for my mother—which made my heart recoil from giving her too great a shock ; and in what other way could it be miti- gated than by my personal presence ina case of emergency? For such a purpose North Wales would be the best haven to make for, since the road thither from my present home lay through Chester—where at that time my mother had fixed her residence. If I had hesitated (and hesitate I did very sincerely) about such a mode of expressing the consideration due to my mother, it was not from any want of decision in my feeling, but really because I feared to be taunted with this act of tenderness, as arguing an exaggerated estimate of my own importance in my mother’s eyes. Io be capable of causing any alarming shock, must I not suppose myself an object of special interest? No: I did not agree to that inference. But no matter. Better to stand ten thousand sneers than one abiding pang, such as time could not abolish, of bitter self-reproach. So I resolved to face this taunt without flinching, and to steer a course for St. John’s Priory,—my mother’s residence near Chester. At the very instant of coming to this resolution, a singular accident occurred to confirm it. On the very day before my rash journey commenced, | received through the post- office a letter bearing this address in a foreign handwriting __A Monsieur Monsieur de Quincy, Chester. his itera- tion of the Monsieur, as a courteous French fashion * for 1 « 45 a courteous French fashion’ :-—And not at all a modern fashion. That famous Countess of Derby (Charlotte de Tremouille) who pre- —_—- AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 69 effecting something equivalent to our own Esquire, was to me at that time an unintelligible novelty. The best way to explain it was to read the letter ; which, to the extent of mon possible, 1 did, but vainly attempted to decipher. So much, however, I spelled out as satisfied me that the letter could not have been meant for myself. The post-mark was, I think, Hamburgh: but the date within was from some place in Normandy ; and eventually it came out that the person addressed was a poor emigrant, some relative of Quatremére de Quincy,’ who had come to Chester, probably as a teacher of French, and now in 1802 found his return to France made easy by the brief and hollow peace of Amiens. Such an obscure person was naturally unknown to any English post-office; and the letter had been forwarded to myself, as the oldest male member of a family at that time necessarily well known in Chester. I was astonished to find myself translated by a touch of the pen not only into a Monsieur, but even into a self- multiplied Monsieur ; or, speaking algebraically, into the square of Monsieur ; having a chance at some future day of being perhaps cubed into Monsieur. From the letter, as I had hastily torn it open, out dropped a draft upon Smith, Payne & Smith for somewhere about forty guineas. At this stage of the revelations opening upon me, it might be fancied that the interest of the case thickened : since sided in the defence of Lathom House (which, and not Knowsley, was then the capital domicile of the Stanleys), when addressing Prince Rupert, sometimes superscribes her envelope 4 Monseigneur le Prince Rupert, but sometimes 4 Momsieur Monsieur le Prince Rupert. 'This was in 1644, the year of Marston Moor, and the penultimate year of the Parliamentary War. 1 «De Quincy’:—The family of De Quincey, or Quincy, or Quincie (spelt of course, like all proper names, under the anarchy pre- vailing as to orthography until the last one hundred and fifty years, in every possible form open to human caprice), was originally Norwegian. Early in the eleventh century this family emigrated from Norway to the South ; and since then it has thrown off three separate swarms— French, English, and Anglo-American—each of which writes the name with its own slight variations. A brief outline of their migrations will be found in the Appendix. 70 CONFESSIONS OF undoubtedly, if this windfall could be seriously meant for myself, and no mistake, never descended upon the head of man, in the outset of a perilous adventure, aid more season- able, nay, more melodramatically critical. But alas! my eye is quick to value the logic of evil chances. Prophet of evil I ever am to myself: forced for ever into sorrowful auguries that I have no power to hide from my own heart, no, not through one night’s solitary dreams. In a moment I saw too plainly that I was not Monsieur. [ might be Monsieur, but not Monsieur to the second power. Who indeed could be my debtor to the amount of forty guineas?» If there really was such a person, why had he been so many years in liquidating his debt? How shameful to suffer me to enter upon my seventeenth year before he made known his debt, or even his amiable existence! Doubtless, in strict morals, this dreadful pro- crastination could not be justified. Still, as the man was apparently testifying his penitence, and in the most prac- tical form (viz., payment), I felt perfectly willing to grant him absolution for past sins, and a general release from all arrears, if any should remain, through all coming genera- tions. But alas! the mere seasonableness of the remittance floored my hopes. A five-guinea debtor might have been a conceivable being: such a debtor might exist in the flesh : him I could believe in; but further my faith would not go ; and, if the money were, after all, bond jide meant for myself, clearly it must come from the Fiend : in which case it became an open question whether I ought to take it. At this stage the case had become a Sphinx’s riddle ; and the solution, if any, must be sought in the letter. But, as to the letter, O heaven and earth! if the Sphinx of old conducted her intercourse with CEdipus by way of letter, and propounded her wicked questions through the post-office of Thebes, it strikes me that she needed only to_ have used French penmanship in order to baffle that fatal decipherer of riddles for ever and ever. At Bath, where the French emigrants mustered in great strength (six thousand, I have heard) during the three closing years of the last century, I, through my mother’s acquaintance AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 71 wth several leading families amongst them, had gained a large experience of French caligraphy. From this experi- ence I had learned that the French aristocracy still persisted (did persist at that period, 1797-1800) in a traditional contempt for all accomplishments of that class as clerkly and plebeian, fitted only (as Shakspere says, when record- ing similar prejudices amongst his own countrymen) to do ‘yeoman’s service.’ One and all, they delegated the care of their spelling to valets and femmes-de-chambre ; some- times even those persons who scoured their blankets and counterpanes scoured their spelling—that is to say, their week-day spelling ; but, as to their Sunday spelling, that superfine spelling which they reserved for their efforts in literature, this was consigned to the care of compositors. Letters written by the royal family of France in 1792-93 still survive, in the memoirs of Clery and others amongst their most faithful servants, which display the utmost ex- cess of ignorance as to grammar and orthography. Then, as to the:penmanship, all seemed to write the same hand, and with the same piece of most ancient wood, or venerable skewer ; all alike scratching out stiff perpendicular letters, as if executed (I should say) with a pair of snuffers. I do not speak thus in any spirit of derision. Such accomplish- ments were wilfully neglected, and even ambitiously, as if in open proclamation of scorn for the arts by which humbler people oftentimes got their bread. And a man of rank would no more conceive himself dishonoured by any deficiencies in the snobbish accomplishments of penman- ship, grammar, or correct orthography, than a gentleman amongst ourselves by inexpertness in the mystery of clean- ing shoes, or of polishing furniture. The result, however, from this systematic and ostentatious neglect of caligraphy is oftentimes most perplexing to all who are called upon to decipher their MSS. It happens, indeed, that the product of this carelessness thus far differs: always it is coarse and inelegant, but sometimes (say in 1-20th of the cases) it becomes specially legible. Far otherwise was the case before me. Being greatly hurried on this my farewell day, I could not make cut two consecutive sentences. Pea pe eth pd lie 72 CONFESSIONS OF Unfortunately, one-half of a sentence sufficed to show that the enclosure belonged to some needy Frenchman living in a country not his own, and struggling probably with the ordinary evils of such a condition—friendlessness and exile. Before the letter came into my hands, it had already suffered some days’ delay. When I noticed this, I found my sympathy with the poor stranger naturally quickened. Already, and unavoidably, he had been suffering from the vexation of a letter delayed; but henceforth, and continually more so, he must be suffering from the anxieties of a letter gone astray. Throughout this farewell day I was unable to carve out any opportunity for going up to the Manchester Post-office; and, without a distinct explanation in my own person, exonerating myself, on the written acknowledgment of the post-office, from all farther responsibility, I was most reluctant to give up the letter. It is true that the necessity of committing a forgery (which crime in those days was punished inexorably with death) before the money could have been fraudulently appropriated would, if made known to the public, have acquitted any casual holder of the letter from all suspicion of dishdnest intentions, But the danger was that, during the suspense and progress of the case whilst awaiting its final settlement, ugly rumours should arise and cling to one’s name amongst the many that would hear only a fragmentary version of the whole affair. At length all was ready. Midsummer, like an army with banners, was moving through the heavens ; already the longest day had passed ; those arrangements, few and imperfect, through which I attempted some partial evasion of disagreeable contingencies likely to arise, had been finished : what more remained for me to do of things that I was able todo? None; and yet, though now at last free to move off, I lingered; lingered as under some sense of dim perplexity, or even of relenting love for the very captivity itself which I was making so violent an effort to abjure, but more intelligibly for all the external objects, living or inanimate, by which that captivity had been | ee AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 73 surrounded and gladdened. What I was hastening to desert, nevertheless I grieved to desert; and, but for the foreign letter, I might have long continued to loiter and procrastinate. That, however, through various and urgent motives which it suggested, quickened my move- ments; and the same hour which brought this letter into my hands witnessed my resolution (uttered audibly to myself in my study) that early on the next day I would take my departure. A day, therefore, had at length arrived, had somewhat suddenly arrived, which would be the last, the very last, on which I should make my appear- ance in the school. It is a just and a feeling remark of Dr. Johnson’s that we never do anything consciously for the last time (of things, that is to say, which we have been long in the habit of doing) without sadness of heart. The secret sense of a farewell or testamentary act I carried along with me into every word or deed of this memorable day. Agent or patient, singly or one of a crowd, I heard for ever some sullen echo of valediction in every change, casual or periodic, that varied the revolving hours from morning to night. Most of all, I felt this valedictory sound as a pathetic appeal when the closing hour of five p.m. brought with it the solemn evening service of the English Church —read by Mr. Lawson; read now, as always, under a reverential stillness of the entire school. Already in itself, without the solemnity of prayers, the decaying light of the dying day suggests a mood of pensive and sympa- thetic sadness. And, if the changes in the light are less impressively made known so early as five o'clock in the depth of summer-tide, not the less we are sensible of being as near to the hours of repose, and to the secret dangers of the night, as if the season were mid-winter. Even thus far there was something that oftentimes had _ profoundly impressed me in this evening liturgy, and its special prayer against the perils of darkness. But greatly was that effect deepened by the symbolic treatment which this liturgy gives to this darkness and to these perils. Naturally, when contemplating that treatment, I had been led vividly to "4 CONFESSIONS OF feel the memorable rhabdomancy' or magical power. of evocation. which. Christianity. has put forth here and in parallel cases. The ordinary physical rhabdomantist, who undertakes to evoke from the dark chambers of our earth wells of water lying far below its surface, and more rarely to evoke minerals, or hidden deposits of jewels and gold, by some magnetic sympathy between his rod and the occult object of his divination, is able to indicate the spot at which this object can be hopefully sought for. Not otherwise has the marvellous magnetism of Christianity called up from darkness sentiments the most august, previously inconceivable, formless, and without life; for previously there had been no religious philosophy equal to ** Rhabdomancy’ :—The Greek word manteia (yavrela), represented by the English form mancy, constitutes the stationary element in a large family of compounds: it means divination, or the art of magically de- ducing some weighty inference (generally prophetic) from any one of the many dark sources sanctioned by Pagan superstition. And universally the particular source relied on is expressed in the prior half of the compound, For instance, omeiros is the Greek word for a dream; and therefore oneiromancy indicates that mode of prophecy which is founded upon the interpretation of dreams. Ormis, again (in the genitive case ornithos), is the common Greek word for a bird; accordingly, ormitho- mancy means prophecy founded on the particular mode of flight noticed amongst any casual gathering of birds. C4eir (yeip) is Greek for the hand; whence cheiromancy expresses the art of predicting a man’s fortune by the lines in his hand, or (under its Latin form from pa/ma) palmistry: Nekros,a dead man, and consequently mecromancy, prophecy founded on the answer extorted either from phantoms, as by the Witch of Endor, or from the corpse itself, as by Lucan’s witch Erichtho. I have allowed myself to wander into this ample illustration of the case, having for many years been taxed by ingenuous readers (confessing their own classical ignorance) with too scanty explanations of my meaning. I go on to say that the Greek word rhabdos (péP8os), a rod—not that sort of rod which the Roman lictors carried, viz., a bundle of twigs, but a wand about as thick as a common cedar pencil, or at most, as the ordinary brass rod of stair-carpets—this, when made from a willow-tree, furnished of old, and furnishes to this day in a southern county of England, a potent instrument of divination. But let it be understood that divination expresses an idea ampler by much than the word prophecy : whilst even this word prophecy, already more limited than divination, is most injuriously narrowed in our received translation of the Bible. To unveil or decipher what is hidden—that is, in effect, the meaning of divination. And, accordingly, in the writings of St. Paul the phrase AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 75 the task of ripening such sentiments; but. also, at the same.time, by~incarnating these. sentiments. in images of corresponding grandeur, it has so exalted their character as to lodge them eternally in human hearts. Flowers, for example, that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honoured as the jewellery of God only by shem—when suddenly the voice of Christianity, countersigning the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God_ himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these. gifts of prophecy never once indicates what the English reader supposes, but exegetic gifts, gifts of interpretation applied to what is dark, of analysis applied to what is logically perplexed, of expansion applied to what is condensed, of practical improvement applied to what might else be overlooked as purely speculative. In Somersetshire, which is a county the most ill-watered of all in England, upon building a house, there arises uniformly a difficulty in selecting a proper spot for sinking a well. The remedy is to call in a set of local rhabdomantists. These men traverse the adjacent ground, holding the willow rod horizontally : wherever that dips, or inclines itself spontaneously to the ground, there will be found water. I have myself not only seen the process tried with success, but have witnessed the enormous trouble, delay, and expense, accruing to those of the opposite faction who refused to benefit by this art. ‘To pursue the tentative plan (i.e. the plan of trying for water by boring at haphazard) ended, so far as I was aware, in multi- plied vexation. In reality, these poor men are, after all, more philo- sophic than those who scornfully reject their services. For the artists obey unconsciously the logic of Lord Bacon: they build upon a long chain of induction, upon the uniform results of their life-long experi- ence. But the counter faction do not deny this experience: all they have to allege is that agreeably to any laws known to themselves a priori, there ought not to be any such experience. Now, a sufficient course of facts overthrows all antecedent plausibilities. Whatever science or scepticism may say, most of the tea-kettles in the vale of Wrington are filled by rhabdomancy. And, after all, the supposed 2 priori scruples against this rhabdomancy are only such scruples as would, antecedently to a trial, have pronounced the mariner’s compass impossible. There is in both cases alike a blind sympathy of some unknown force, which no man can explain, with a passive index that practically guides you aright—even if Mephistopheles should be at the bottom of the affair. — 76 CONFESSIONS OF Winds again, hurricanes, the eternal breathings, soft or loud, of /Eolian power, wherefore had they, raving or sleeping, escaped all moral arrest and detention? Simply because vain it were to offer a nest for the reception of some new moral birth whilst no religion is yet moving amongst men that can furnish such a birth. Vain is the image that should illustrate a heavenly sentiment, if the sentiment is yet unborn. Then, first, when it had become necessary to the purposes of a spiritual religion that the spirit of man, as the fountain of all religion, should in some com- mensurate reflex image have its grandeur and its mysteri- ousness emblazoned, suddenly the pomp and mysterious path of winds and tempests, blowing whither they list, and from what fountains no man knows, are cited from darkness and neglect, to give and to receive reciprocally an impassioned glorification, where the lower mystery enshrines and illustrates the higher. Call for_the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is shat? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is “hat? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.. And these two grandeurs, the mighty sentiment and the mighty spectacle, are by Christianity married together. Here again, in his prayer ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord!’ were the darkness and the great shadows of night made symbolically significant: these great powers, Night and Darkness, that belong to aboriginal Chaos, were made representative of the perils that continually menace poor afflicted human nature. With deepest sympathy I accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness—perils that Lseemed to see, in the ambush of midnight solitude, brooding-around the beds of sleeping nations; perils from even worse forms of dark- ness shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts; perils from temptations weaving unseen snares for our footing ; perils from the limitations of our own misleading knowledge. Prayers had finished. The school had dissolved itself. Six o’clock came, seven, eight. By three hours nearer ELE ee AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER er, stood the dying day to its departure. By three hours nearer, therefore, stood we to that darkness which our English liturgy calls into such symbolic grandeur, as hiding beneath its shadowy mantle all perils that besiege our human infirmity. But in summer, in the immediate suburbs of mid-summer, the vast scale of the heavenly movements is read in their slowness. Time becomes the expounder of Space. And now, though eight o'clock has struck, the sun was still lingering above the horizon: the light, broad and gaudy, having still two hours of travel to face before it would assume that tender fading hue pre- lusive to the twilight.1. Now came the last official cere- mony of the day: the students were all mustered ; and the names of all were challenged according to the order of precedency. My name, as usual, came first.2 Stepping 1¢ 7) the twilight’:—i.e. to the second twilight: for I remember to have read in some German work upon Hebrew antiquities, and also in agreat English divine of 1630 (namely, Isaac Ambrose), that the Jews in elder times made two twilights, first and second ; the first they called the dove’s twilight, or crepusculum of the day; the second they called the raven’s twilight, or crepusculum of the night. 2 « First?:—Within the school I should mot have been first: for in the trinity which composed the head class there was no absolute or meritorious precedency, but simply a precedency of chance. Our dignity, as leaders of the school, raised us above all petty competitions ; yet, as it was unavoidable to stand in some order, this was regulated by seniority. 1, therefore, as junior amongst the three, was tertius inter pares. But my two seniors happened to be day-scholars: so that, in Mr. Lawson’s house, I rose into the supreme place. There, I was princeps senatis, Such trivial circumstantialities I notice, as checks upon all openings to inaccuracy, great or small. It would vitiate the interest which any reader might otherwise take in this narrative, if for one moment it were supposed that any feature of the case were var- nished or distorted. From the very first, I had been faithful to the most rigorous law of accuracy—even in absolute trifles. But I became even more jealous over myself, after an Irish critic, specially brilliant as a wit and as ascholar, but also specially malicious, had attempted to impeach the accuracy of my narrative, in its London section, upon alleged internal grounds. I wish it could have been said with truth, that we of the leading form were, not a triad, buta duad. The facts, however, of the case will not allow me to say this. Facts, as people generally remark, are stubborn things. Yes, and too often very spiteful things; as in this case, where, if it were not for them, 1 might describe myself as having 78 CONFESSIONS OF forward, I passed Mr. Lawson, and bowed to him, looking earnestly in his face, and saying to myself, ‘He is old and infirm, and in this world I shall not see him again.’ | was right; I never did see him again, nor ever shall. He looked at me complacently ; smiled placidly ; returned my salutation (not knowing it to be my valediction); and we parted for ever. Intellectually, I might not have seen cause to reverence him in any emphatic sense. But very sincerely I respected him as a conscientious man, faithful to his duties, and as, even in his latter ineffectual struggle with these duties, inflicting more suffering upon himself than upon others ; finally, I respected him as a sound and accurate (though not brilliant) scholar. | Personally I owed him much gratitude; for he had been uniformly kind to me, and had allowed me such indulgences as lay in his power; and I grieved at the thought of the morti- fication I should inflict upon him, The morning came which was to launch me into the world; that morning from which, and from its conée- quences, my whole succeeding life has, in many important points, taken its colouring. At half after three I rose, and gazed with deep emotion at the ancient collegiate church, ‘dressed in earliest light,’ and beginning to crimson with the deep lustre of a cloudless July morning. I was firm and immovable in my purpose, but_yet agitated by anticipation of uncertain danger and troubles. T'o this agitation the deep peace of the morning presented an affecting contrast, and in some degree amedicine. 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 noon- day 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 one sole assessor in the class, and in that case he and I might have been likened to Castor and Pollux, who went up and down like alternate buckets—one rising with the dawn (or Phosphorus), and the other (viz., myself) rising with Hesperus, and reigning all night long 4 p f AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 79 presence of man, and his 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 nearly a 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 had lost my gaiety and peace of mind during the strife and fever of contention with my guardian, yet, on the other hand, as a boy 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. Happy hours? Yes; and was it certain that ever again I should enjoy hours as happy? At this point it is not impossible that, left to my own final impressions, I might have receded from my plan. But it seemed to me, as too often happens in such cases, that no retreat was now open. The confidence which unavoidably I had reposed in a groom of Mr. Lawson’s made it dangerous. The effect of this distracted view was, not to alter my plan, but to throw despondency for one sad half hour over the whole prospect before me. In that condition, with my eyes open, I dreamed. Suddenly a sort of trance, a frost as of some death-like revelation, wrapped round me; and I found renewed within me a hateful remem- brance derived from a moment that I had long left behind. ‘Two years before, when I wanted about as much of my fifteenth birthday as now of my seventeenth, I happened to be in London for part of a single day, with a friend of my own age. Naturally, amongst some eight or ten great spectacles which challenged our earnest attention, St. Paul’s Cathedral had been one. This we had visited, and consequently the Whispering Gallery.’ More than by all beside I had been impressed by this : 1 To those who have never visited the Whispering Gallery, nor have read any account of it amongst other acoustic phenomena described in scientific treatises, it may be proper to mention, as the distinguishing feature of the case, that a word or a question, uttered at one end of the gallery in the gentlest of whispers, is reverberated at the other end in peals of thunder. 80 CONFESSIONS OF and some half-hour later, as we were standing beneath the dome, and I should imagine pretty nearly on the very spot where rather more than five years subsequently Lord Nelson was buried,—a spot from which we saw, pompously floating to and fro in the upper spaces of a great aisle running westwards from ourselves, many flags captured from France, Spain, and Holland,—I, having my previous impressions of awe deepened by these solemn trophies of chance and change amongst mighty nations, had suddenly been surprised by a dream, as profound as at present, in which a thought that often had persecuted me figured triumphantly. This thought turned upon the fatality that must often attend an evil choice. As an oracle of fear I remembered that great Roman warning, Nescit vox missa reverti (that a word once uttered is irrevocable), a freezing arrest upon the motions of hope, too sanguine that haunted me in many shapes. Long before that fifteenth year of mine, I had noticed, as a worm lying at the heart of life and fretting its security, the fact that innumerable acts of choice change countenance and are variously appraised at varying stages of life—shift with the shifting hours. Already, at fifteen, I had become deeply ashamed of judgments which I had_once~ pro- nounced, of idle hopes that I had once~encouraged, false admirations or contempts with which once I had sympathised. And, as to acts which I surveyed with any doubts at all, I never felt sure that after some succession of years I might not feel withering doubts about. them, both as to principle and as to inevitable results. This sentiment of nervous recoil from any word or deed that could not be recalled had been suddenly re- awakened on that London morning by the impressive experience of the Whispering Gallery. At the earlier end of the gallery had stood my friend, breathing in the softest of whispers a solemn but not acceptable truth. At the further end, after running along the walls of the gallery, that solemn truth reached me as a deafening menace in tempestuous uproars. And now in these last lingering moments, when I dreamed ominously with open eyes in LAL AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 81 my Manchester study, once again that London menace broke angrily upon me as out of a thick cloud with redoubled strength ; a voice, too late for warning, seemed audibly to say, ‘Once leave this house, and a Rubicon is placed between. thee and all possibility of return. Thou wilt not say that what thou doest is altogether approved in thy. secret_heart. Even now thy conscience speaks against it in sullen whispers; but at the other end of thy long life-gallery that same conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders.’ A sudden step upon the stairs broke up my dream, and recalled me to myself. Dangerous hours*were now drawing near, and I prepared for a hasty farewell. I shed tears 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 nineteen! years ago; and yet, at this moment, I see, as if it were but yesterday, the lineaments and expressions of the object on which I fixed my parting gaze. It was the picture of a lovely lady, which hung over the mantelpiece ; the eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful, and the whole countenance so radiant with divine tranquillity, that I had a thousand times laid down my pen,-or my book, to gather con- solation from it, as a devotee from his patron saint.? 1 Written in the August of 1821, ® The housekeeper was in the habit of telling me that the lady had /ived (meaning, perhaps, had been born) two centuries ago; that date would better agree with the tradition that the portrait was a copy from Vandyke. All that she knew further about the lady was that either to the grammar school, or to that particular college at Oxford with which the school was connected, or else to that particular college at Oxford with which Mr. Lawson personally was connected, or else, fourthly, to Mr. Lawson himself as a private individual, the unknown lady has been a special benefactress. She was also a special bene- factress to me, through eighteen months, by means of her sweet Madonna countenance. And in some degree it serves to spiritualise and to hallow this service that of her who unconsciously rendered it I know neither the name, nor the exact rank or age, nor the place where she lived and died. She was parted from me by perhaps two centuries ; I from her by the gulf of eternity. G 82 CONFESSIONS OF Whilst I was yet gazing upon it, the deep tones of the old church clock proclaimed that it was six o'clock. I went up to the picture, kissed it, 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 being at an aerial 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 com- municated my embarrassment to a groom of the head- master’s. The groom declared his readiness to 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’ 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 great anxiety for the event. For some time I heard him descending with steps slow and steady; 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 suggested that all was lost, and that my sole chance for effecting a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage. However, on reflection, I determined to abide the issue. The f~-> AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 83 groom, meantime, was in the utmost alarm, both on his own account and 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 forbear joining in it ; subdued to this, not so much by the comic wilfulness of the trunk, trundling down from step to step with accelerated pace and multiplying uproar, like the Adas dvasdjs1 (the con- tumacious stone) of Sisyphus, as by the effect it had upon the groom. We both expected, as a matter of course, that Mr. Lawson 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 subsided, no sound, or rustling even, was to be heard in the bedroom. Mr. Lawson had a painful complaint, which, oftentimes keeping him awake, made his sleep, when it did come, peculiarly deep. 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,’ or more truly it might be said, with my own headstrong folly for law and impulse, 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 an old volume, containing about one-half of Canter’s Euripides, in the other. On leaving Manchester, by a south-western route, towards Chester and Wales, the first town that I reached (to the best of my remembrance) was Altrincham— colloquially called wirigem. When a child of three years old, and suffering from the hooping-cough, I had been carried for change of air to different places on the Lancashire coast ; and in order to benefit by as large a * ‘Abrus Grevra weddvde vdivdero Adas dvaudijs.’—Hom. Odyss. 84. CONFESSIONS OF compass as possible of varying atmospheres, I and my nurse had been made to rest for the first night of our tour at this cheerful little town of Altrincham. On the next morning, which ushered in a most dazzling day of July, I rose earlier than my nurse fully approved : but in no long time she found it advisable to follow my example ; and after putting me through my morning’s drill of ablutions and the Lord’s-prayer, no sooner had she fully arranged my petticoats than she lifted me up in her arms, threw open the window, and let me suddenly look down upon the gayest scene I had ever beheld—viz., the little market-place of Altrincham at eight o'clock in the morning. It happened to be the market-day ; and I, who till then had never consciously been in any town whatever, was equally astonished and delighted with the novel gaiety of the scene. Fruits, such as can be had in July, and flowers were scattered about in profusion : even the stalls of the butchers, from their brilliant cleanliness, appeared attractive : and the bonny young women of Altrincham were all tripping about in caps and aprons coquettishly disposed. ‘The general hilarity of the scene at this early hour, with the low murmurings of pleasurable conversation and laughter, that rose up like a fountain to the open window, left so profound an impression upon me that I never lost it. All this occurred, as I have said, about eight o’clock on a superb July morning. Exactly at that time of the morning, on exactly such another heavenly day of July, did I, leaving Manchester at six a.m., naturally enough find myself in the centre of the Altrincham market-place. Nothing had altered. There were the very same fruits and flowers; the same bonny young women tripping up and down in the same (no, zo¢ the same) coquettish bonnets ; everything was apparently the same: perhaps the window of my bedroom was still open, only my nurse and I were not looking out; for alas! on recollection, fourteen years precisely had passed since then. Breakfast-time, however, is always a cheerful stage of the day; if a man can forget his cares at any season, it is then; and after a walk of seven miles it is AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 85 doubly so. I felt it at the time, and have stopped, there- fore, to notice it, as a singular coincidence, that twice, and by the merest accident, I should find myself, precisely as the clocks on a July morning were all striking eight, drawing inspiration of pleasurable feelings from the genial sights and sounds in the little market-place of Altrincham. There I breakfasted ; and already by the two hours’ exercise I felt myself half restored to health. After an hour’s rest, I started again upon my journey: all my gloom and despondency were already retiring to the rear ; and, as I left Altrincham, I said to myself, ‘ All places, it seems, are not Whispering Galleries.’ The distance between Manchester and Chester was about forty miles. What it is under railway changes | know not. This I planned to walk in two days: for, though the whole might have been performed in one, I saw no use in exhausting myself ; and my walking powers were rusty from long disuse. I wished to bisect the journey ; and, as nearly as I could expect—1.e. within two or three miles—such a bisection was attained in a clean roadside inn, of the class so commonly found in England. A kind, motherly landlady, easy in her circumstances, having no motive for rapacity, and looking for her livelihood much less to her inn than to her farm, guaranteed to me a safe and profound night’s rest. On the following morning there remained not quite eighteen miles between myself and venerable Chester. Before I reached it, so mighty now (as ever before and since) had become the benefit from the air and the exercise that often- times I felt inebriated and crazy with ebullient spirits. But for the accursed letter, which sometimes Came over me, As doth the raven o’er the infected house 3 I should have too much forgot my gravity under this new- born-health. For two hours before reaching Chester, from the accident of the south-west course which the road itself pursued, I saw held up aloft before my eyes that matchless spectacle, 86 CONFESSIONS OF New, and yet as old As the foundations of the heavens and earth, an elaborate and pompous sunset hanging over the mountains of North Wales. The clouds passed slowly through several arrangements, and in the last of these I read the very scene which six months before I had read in a most exquisite poem of Wordsworth’s, extracted entire into a London newspaper (I think the S*. Fames’s Chronicle), It was a Canadian lake, With all its fairy crowds Of islands that together lie As quietly as spots of sky Amongst the evening clouds. The scene in the poem (‘ Ruth’), that had been originally mimicked by the poet from the sky, was here re-mimicked and rehearsed to the life, as it seemed, by the sky from the poet. Was I then, in July 1802, really quoting from Wordsworth ? Yes, reader ; and I only in all Europe. In 1799 I had become acquainted with ‘Weare Seven’ at Bath. _ In the winter of 1801-2 I had read the whole of ‘ Ruth’ ; early in 1803 I had written to Wordsworth. In May 1803 I had received a very long answer from Wordsworth. The next morning after reaching Chester, my first thought on rising was directed to the vexatious letter in my custody. ‘The odious responsibility, thrust upon me in connexion with this letter, was now becoming every hour more irritating, because every hour more embarrass- ing to the freedom of my own movements, since it must by this time have drawn the post-office into the ranks of my pursuers. Indignant I was that this letter should have the power of making myself an accomplice in caus- ing anxiety, perhaps even calamity, to the poor emigrant —a man doubly liable to unjust suspicion ; first, as by his profession presumably poor, and, secondly, as an alien. Indignant I was that this most filthy of letters should also have the power of forcing me into all sorts of indirect and owardly movements at inns ; for beyond all things it seemed to me important that I should not be arrested, or | | a cy a ee AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 87 even for a moment challenged, as the wrongful holder of an important letter, before I had testified, by my own spontaneous transfer of it, that I had not dallied with any . idea of converting it to my own benefit. In some way | _must contrive to restore the letter. But was it not then the simplest of all courses to take my hat before sitting down to breakfast, present myself at the post-office, tender my explanation, and then (like Christian in Bunyan’s allegory) to lay down my soul-wearying burden at the feet of those who could sign my certificate of absolution? Was not that simple? Was not that easy? Oh yes, beyond a doubt. And, if a favourite fawn should be carried off by a lion, would it not be a very simple and easy course to walk after the robber, follow him into his den, and reason with the wretch on the indelicacy of his conduct?) _In my particular circumstances, the post-office was in relation to myself simply a lion’s den. Two separate parties, I felt satisfied, must by this time be in chase of me; and the two chasers would be confluent at the post-office. Beyond all other objects which I had to keep in view, paramount was that of fencing against my own re-capture. Anxious I was on behalf of the poor foreigner; but it did not strike me that to this anxiety I was bound to sacrifice myself. Now, if I went to the post-office, I felt sure that nothing else would be the result ; and afterwards it turned out that in this anticipation I had been right. For it struck me that the nature of the enclosure in the French letter—viz., the fact that without a forgery it was not negotiable—could not be known certainly to anybody but myself. Doubts upon that point must have quickened the anxieties of all connected with myself, or connected with the case. More urgent consequently wouid have been the applications of ‘Monsieur Monsieur’ to the post-office ; and consequently of the post-office to the Priory ; and consequently more easily suggested and concerted between the post-office and the Priory would be all the arrangements for stopping me, in the event of my taking the route of Chester—in which case it was natural to suppose that I might personally return the 88 CONFESSIONS OF letter to the official authorities. Of course, none of these measures was certainly known to myself; but I guessed at them as reasonable probabilities; and it was evident that the fifty and odd hours since my elopement from Manchester had allowed ample time for concerting all the requisite preparations. As a last resource, in default of any better occurring, it is likely enough that my anxiety would have tempted me into this mode of surrendering my abominable trust, which by this time I regarded with such eyes of burning malice as Sinbad must have directed at intervals towards the venerable ruffian that sat astride upon his shoulders. But things had not yet come to Sinbad’s state of desperation ; so, immediately after break- fast, | took my hat, determining to review the case and adopt some final decision in the open air. For I have always found it easier to think over a matter of perplexity whilst walking in wide open spaces, under the broad eye of the natural heavens, than whilst shut up in a room. But at the very door of the inn I was suddenly brought to a pause by the recollection that some of the servants from the Priory were sure on every forenoon to be at times in the streets. The streets, however, could be evaded by shaping a course along the city walls; which I did, and descended into some obscure lane that brought me gradually to the banks of the river Dee. In the in- fancy of its course amongst the Denbighshire mountains, this river (famous in our pre-Norman history for the earliest parade* of English monarchy) is wild and pictur- esque; and even below my mother’s Priory it wears a character of interest. But, a mile or so nearer to its mouth, when leaving Chester for Parkgate, it becomes miserably/ tame ; and the several reaches of the river take the appearance of formal canals. On the right bank’ of the river runs an artificial mound, called the 1 * Barviest Parade’ :—It was a very scenical parade, for somewhere along this reach of the Dee—viz. immediately below St. John’s Priory— Edgar, the first sovereign of all England, was rowed by nine vassal reguli. 2 * Right bank’ :—But which bank is right, and which left, under circumstances of position varying by possibility without end? This is a reasonable demur ; but yet it argues an inexperienced reader, For AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 89 Cop. It was, I believe, originally a Danish work ; and certainly its name is Danish (7.e. Icelandic, or old Danish), and the same from which is derived our architectural word coping. Upon this bank I was walking, and throwing my gaze along the formal vista presented by the river. Some trifle of anxiety might mingle with this gaze at the first, lest perhaps Philistines might be abroad ; for it was just possible that I had been watched. But I have generally found that, if you are in quest of some certain escape from Philistines of whatsoever class — sheriff - officers, bores, no matter what—the surest refuge is to be found amongst hedgerows and fields, amongst cows and sheep : in fact, cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures ; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them ; and, in short, I am not ashamed to pro- fess a deep love for these quiet creatures. On the present occasion there were many cows grazing in the fields below the Cop: but all along the Cop itself I could descry no person whatever answering to the idea of a Philistine: in fact, there was nobody at all, except one woman, apparently middle-aged (meaning by shat from thirty-five to forty- five), neatly dressed, though perhaps in rustic fashion, and by no possibility belonging to any class of my enemies ; for already I was near enough to see so much. This woman might be a quarter of a mile distant, and was steadily advancing towards me—face to face. Soon, therefore, I was beginning to read the character of her features pretty distinctly; and her countenance naturally served as a mirror to echo and reverberate my own feelings, consequently my own horror (horror without always the position of the spectator is conventionally fixed. In mili- tary tactics, in philosophic geography, in history, etc., the uniform assumption is that you are standing with your back to the source of the river, and your eyes travelling along with its current. ‘That bank of the river which under these circumstances lies upon your right is the right bank aédsolutely, and not relatively only (as would be the case if a room, and not a river, were concerned). Hence it follows that the Middlesex side of the Thames is always the left bank, and the Surrey side always the right bank, no matter whether you are moving from London to Oxford, or reversely from Oxford to London. go CONFESSIONS OF exaggeration it was), at a sudden uproar of tumultuous sounds rising clamorously ahead. Ahead I mean in rela- tion to myself, but to her the sound was from the rear. Our situation was briefly this. Nearly half-a-mile behind the station of the woman, that reach of the river along which we two were moving came to an abrupt close; so that the next reach, making nearly a right-angled turn, lay entirely out of view. From this unseen reach it was that the angry clamour, so passionate and so mysterious, arose : and I, for my part, having never heard such a fierce battling outcry, nor even heard of such a cry, either in books or on the stage, in prose or verse), could not so much as whisper a guess to myself upon its probable cause. Only this I felt, that blind, unorganised nature it must be—and nothing in human or in brutal wrath— that could utter itself by such an anarchy of sea-like uproars. . What was it? Where was it? Whence was it? Earthquake was it? convulsion of the steadfast earth? or was it the breaking loose from ancient chains of some deep morass like that of Solway? More prob- able it seemed that the dvw worduov of Euripides (the flowing backwards of rivers to their fountains) now, at last, after ages of expectation, had been suddenly realised. Not long I needed to speculate ; for within half a minute, perhaps, from the first arrest of our attention, the proxi- mate cause of this mystery declared itself to our eyes, although the remote cause (the hidden cause of that visible cause) was still as dark as before. Round that right-angled turn which I have mentioned as wheeling into the next succeeding reach of the river, suddenly as with the trampling of cavalry—but all dressing accurately —and the water at the outer angle sweeping so much faster than that at the inner angle, as to keep the front of advance rigorously in line, violently careered round into our own placid watery vista a huge charging block of waters, filling the whole channel of the river, and com- ing down upon us at the rate of forty miles an hour. Well was it for us, myself and that respectable rustic woman, us the Deucalion and Pyrrha of this perilous AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER g! moment, sole survivors apparently of the deluge (since by accident there was at that particular moment on that particular Cop nothing else to survive), that by means of this Cop, and of ancient Danish hands (possibly not yet paid for their work), we could survive. In fact, this watery breastwork, a perpendicular wall of water carrying itself as true as if controlled by a mason’s plumb-line, rode forward at such a pace, that obviously the fleetest horse or dromedary would have had no chance of escape. Many a decent railway even, among railways since born its rivals, would not have had above the third of a chance. Naturally, I had too short aytime for observing much or accurately ; and universally“ am a poor hand at observ- ings else I should say, that this riding block of crystal waters did not gallop, but went at a long trot ; yes, long trot—that most frightful of paces in a tiger, in a buffalo, or in_a-rebellion of waters. Even a ghost, I feel con- vinced, would appal me more if coming up at a long diabolical trot, than at a canter or gallop. The first impulse to both of us was derived from cowardice ; cowardice the most abject and selfish. Such is man, though a Deucalion elect; such is woman, though a decent Pyrrha. Both of us ran like hares; neither did I, Deucalion, think of poor Pyrrha at all for the first sixty seconds. Yet, on the other hand, why should I? It struck me seriously that St. George’s Channel (and, if so, beyond a doubt, the Atlantic Ocean) had broke loose, and was, doubtless, playing the same insufferable gambols upon all rivers along a seaboard of six to seven thousand miles ; in which case, as all the race of woman must be doomed, how romantic a speculation it was for me, sole relic of literature, to think specially of one poor Pyrrha, probably very illiterate, whom I had never yet spoken to. That idea pulled me up. Not spoken to her? ‘Then I would speak to her; and the more so, because the sound of the pursuing river told me that flight was useless. And, besides, if any reporter or sub-editor of some Chester chronicle should, at this moment, with his glass be sweeping the Cop, and discover me flying under these 92 CONFESSIONS OF unchivalrous circumstances, he might gibbet me to all eternity. Halting, therefore (and really I had not run above eighty or a hundred steps), I waited for my solitary co-tenant of the Cop. She was a little blown by running, and could not easily speak ; besides which, at the very moment of her coming up, the preternatural column of waters, running in the very opposite direction to the natural current of the river, came up with us, ran by with the ferocious uproar of a hurricane, sent up the sides of the Cop a salute of waters, as if hypocritically pretending to kiss our feet, but secretly understood by all parties as a vain treachery for pulling us down into the flying deluge ; whilst all along both banks the mighty refluent wash was heard as it rode along, leaving memorials, by sight and by sound, of its victorious power. But my female associate in this terrific drama, what said she, on coming up with me? Or what said I? For, by accident, I it was that spoke first ; notwith- standing the fact, notorious and undeniable, that J had never been introduced to her. Here, however, be it understood, as a case now solemnly adjudicated and set at rest, that, in the midst of any great natural convulsion —earthquake, suppose, waterspout, tornado, or eruption of Vesuvius—it shall and may be lawful in all time coming (any usage or tradition to the contrary not- withstanding), for two English people to communicate with each other, although, by affidavit made before two justices of the peace, it shall have been proved that no previous introduction had been possible; in all other cases the old statute of non-intercourse holds good. Meantime, the present case, in default of more circum- stantial evidence, might be regarded, if not as an earth- quake, yet as ranking amongst the first-fruits or blossoms of an earthquake. So I spoke without scruple. All my freezing English reserve gave way under this boiling sense of having been so recently running for life: and then, again, suppose the water column should come back —riding along with the current, and no longer riding against 1t—in that case, we and all the County Palatine ) ne, OEE = \ | \ x AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 93 might soon have to run for our lives. Under such threatenings of common peril, surely the mappnoia, or unlimited license of speech, ought spontaneously to pro- claim itself without waiting for sanction. So I asked her the meaning of this horrible tumult in the waters: how did she read the mystery? Her answer was, that though she had never before seen such a thing, yet from her grandmother she had often heard of it ; and, if she had run before it, that was because J ran; and a little, perhaps, because the noise frightened her. What was it, then? I asked. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘the Bore; and it was an affection to which only some few rivers here and there were liable ; and the Dee was one of these.’ So ignorant was I, that, until that moment, I had never heard of such afhervous affection in rivers}, Subsequently I found that, amongst English rivers, the neighbouring river Severn, a far more important stream, suffered at spring-tides the same kind of hysterics, and, perhaps, some few other rivers in this British Island ; but amongst Indian rivers, only the Ganges. At last, when the Bore had been discussed to the full extent of our united ignorance, I went off to the subject of that other curse, far more afflicting than any conceivable bore—viz., the foreign letter in my pocket. The Bore had certainly alarmed us for ninety or a hundred seconds, but the letter would poison my very existence, like the bottle-imp, until I could transfer it to some person truly qualified to receive it. Might not my fair friend on the Cop be marked-out-by Fate as‘the coming woman.” born to deliver me from this pocket curse? It is true that she displayed a rustic simplicity somewhat resembling that of Audrey in As you like it. Her, in fact, not at all more than Audrey, had the gods been pleased to make ‘ poetical.’ But, for my particular mission, shat might be amongst her best qualifications. At any rate, I was wearied in spirit under my load of responsibility: personally to liberate myself by visiting the post-office, too surely I felt as the ruin of my enterprise in its very outset. Some agent must be employed ; and where could one be found promising by 94 CONFESSIONS OF looks, words, manners, more trustworthiness than this agent, sent by accident? The case almost explained itself. She readily understood how the resemblance of a name had thrown the letter into my possession ; and that the simply remedy was—to restore it to the right owner through the right channel, which channel was the never- enough-to-be-esteemed General Post-office, at that time pitching its tents and bivouacking nightly in Lombard Street, but for this special case legally represented by the Chester head-office : a service of no risk to her, for which, on the contrary, all parties would thank her. I, to begin, begged to put my thanks into the shape of half-a-crown : but, as some natural doubts arose with respect to her precise station in life (for she might be a farmer’s wife, and not a servant), I thought it advisable to postulate the existence of some youthful daughter: to which mytho- logical person I begged to address my offering, when incarnated in the shape of a doll. I therefore, Deucalion that was or had been provision- ally through a brief interval of panic, took leave of my Pyrrha, sole partner in the perils and anxieties of that astounding Bore, dismissing her—Thessalian Pyrrha—not to any Thessalian vales of Tempe, but—O ye powers of moral anachronism !—to the Chester Post-office; and warning her on no account to be prematurely wheedled out of her secret. Her position, diplomatically speaking, was better (as I made her understand) than that of the post-office: she having something in her gift—viz., an appointment to forty guineas ; whereas in the counter-gift of the proud post-office was nothing ; neither for instant fruition nor in far-off reversion. Her, in fact, one might regard as. a.Pandora, carrying a box with-something better than hope. at the bottoni;~ for hope-too-often betrays ; but a draft upon Smith, Payne, & Smith, which never betrays, and for a_sum.which, on the authority of Goldsmith, _makes~an English-clergyman- ‘passing rich’ through a whole twelvemonth, entitled her to look scornfully upon _every.second person that she. met. | In about two hours the partner of my solitary kingdonY PTT Tita = iis ae AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 95 upon the Cop re-appeared, with the welcome assurance that Chester had survived the Bore, that all was right, and that anything which ever had been looking crooked was now made straight as the path of an arrow. She had given ‘my love’ (so she said) to the post-office; had been thanked by more than either one or two amongst the men of letters who figured in the equipage of that establish- ment ; and had been assured that, long before daylight departed, one large cornucopia of justice and felicity would be emptied out upon the heads of all parties in the drama. I myself, not the least afflicted person on the roll, was already released—suddenly released, and fully—from the iniquitous load of responsibility thrust upon me; the poor emigrant was released from his conflict with fears that were uncertain, and creditors too certain; the post-office was released from the scandal and embarrassment of a gross irregularity, that might eventually have brought the post- master-general down upon their haunches; and the house- hold at the Priory were released from all anxieties, great and small, sound and visionary, on the question of my fancied felony. In those anxieties, one person there was that never had condescended to participate. This was my eldest sister Mary—just eleven months senior to myself. She was among the gentlest of girls, and’ yet/ from the very first she had testified the most incredulous disdain of all who fancied her brother capable of any thought so base as that of meditating a wrong to a needy exile. At present, after exchanging a few parting words, and a few final or farewell farewells with my faithful female’ agent, further business I had none to detain me in Chester, except what concerned this particular sister. My business with her was not to thank her for the resolute justice which she had done me, 1 Some people are irritated, or even fancy themselves insulted, by overt acts of alliteration, as many people are by puns. On their account let me say, that, although there are here eight separate f’s in less than half a sentence, this is to be held as pure accident. In fact, at one time there were nine f’s in the original cast of the sentence, until I, in pity of the affronted people, substituted female agent for JSemale friend. 96 CONFESSIONS OF since as yet I could not know of that service, but simply to see her, to learn the domestic news of the Priory, and, according to the possibilities of the case, to concert with her some plan of regular correspondence. Meantime it happened that a maternal uncle, a military man on the Bengal establishment, who had come to England on a three-years’ leave of absence (according to the custom in those days), was at this time a visitor at the Priory. My mother’s establishment of servants was usually limited to five persons—all, except one, elderly and torpid. But my uncle, who had brought to England some beautiful Arab and Persian horses, found it necessary to gather about his stables an extra body of men and boys. ‘These were all alert and active; so that, when I reconnoitred the windows of the Priory in the dusk, hoping in some way to attract my sister’s attention, I not only failed in that object, seeing no lights in any room which could naturally have been occupied by her, but I also found myself growing into an object of special attention to certain unknown servants, who, having no doubt received instructions to look out for me, easily inferred from my anxious move- ments that I must be the person ‘wanted.’ Uneasy at all the novel appearances of things, I went away, and returned, after an hour’s interval, armed with a note to my sister, requesting her to watch for an opportunity of coming out for a few minutes under the shadows of the little ruins in the Priory garden,! where I meantime 1