breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the
whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an
intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits
and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be
a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in
it to an excess not yet _recorded_ {1} of any other man, it is no less
true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a
religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard
attributed to any other man--have untwisted, almost to its final links,
the accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may
reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-
indulgence. Not to insist that in my case the self-conquest was
unquestionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry,
according as that name shall be extended to acts aiming at the bare
relief of pain, or shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement
of positive pleasure.

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and if I did, it is possible that
I might still resolve on the present act of confession in consideration
of the service which I may thereby render to the whole class of opium-
eaters. But who are they? Reader, I am sorry to say a very numerous
class indeed. Of this I became convinced some years ago by computing at
that time the number of those in one small class of English society (the
class of men distinguished for talents, or of eminent station) who were
known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters; such, for instance,
as the eloquent and benevolent ---, the late Dean of ---, Lord ---, Mr.
--- the philosopher, a late Under-Secretary of State (who described to me
the sensation which first drove him to the use of opium in the very same
words as the Dean of ---, viz., "that he felt as though rats were gnawing
and abrading the coats of his stomach"), Mr. ---, and many others hardly