they inflict, and the efforts of abstinence they exact from poor sinners
like myself. An inhuman moralist I can no more endure in my nervous
state than opium that has not been boiled. At any rate, he who summons
me to send out a large freight of self-denial and mortification upon any
cruising voyage of moral improvement, must make it clear to my
understanding that the concern is a hopeful one. At my time of life (six-
and-thirty years of age) it cannot be supposed that I have much energy to
spare; in fact, I find it all little enough for the intellectual labours
I have on my hands, and therefore let no man expect to frighten me by a
few hard words into embarking any part of it upon desperate adventures of
morality.

Whether desperate or not, however, the issue of the struggle in 1813 was
what I have mentioned, and from this date the reader is to consider me as
a regular and confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask whether on any
particular day he had or had not taken opium, would be to ask whether his
lungs had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions.
You understand now, reader, what I am, and you are by this time aware
that no old gentleman "with a snow-white beard" will have any chance of
persuading me to surrender "the little golden receptacle of the
pernicious drug." No; I give notice to all, whether moralists or
surgeons, that whatever be their pretensions and skill in their
respective lines of practice, they must not hope for any countenance from
me, if they think to begin by any savage proposition for a Lent or a
Ramadan of abstinence from opium. This, then, being all fully understood
between us, we shall in future sail before the wind. Now then, reader,
from 1813, where all this time we have been sitting down and loitering,
rise up, if you please, and walk forward about three years more. Now
draw up the curtain, and you shall see me in a new character.