on the fourth more than double the quantity to which of late he had
been accustomed, would have prevented the incautious conclusion,
suggested by his table, that De Quincey made use of laudanum but on
two occasions after the expiration of the fourth week.

Whatever may have been the length of time taken by De Quincey "in
unwinding to its last link the chain which bound" him, it is certain
we have no means of knowing it from any thing he has recorded. Be it
shorter or longer, his failure to state definitely the entire time
employed in his experiment occasioned me much and needless
suffering. I thought that if another could descend, without the
experience of greater misery than De Quincey records, from one hundred
and thirty drops of laudanum, equivalent to about five grains of
opium, to nothing, in thirty-four or five days, and in this brief
period abandon a habit of more than nine years' growth, a more
resolved will might achieve the same result in the same number of
days, though the starting-point in respect to aggregate quantity and
to length of use was much greater. The object, therefore, to be
accomplished in my own case was to part company forever with opium in
thirty-five days, cost what suffering it might. On the 26th of
November, in a half-desperate, half-despondent temper of mind, I
commenced the long-descending _gradus_ which I had rapidly
ascended so many years before. During this entire period the quantity
consumed had been pretty uniformly eighty grains of best Turkey opium
daily. Occasional attempts to diminish the quantity, but of no long
continuance, and occasional overindulgence during protracted bad
weather, furnished the only exceptions to the general uniformity of
the habit.

The experiment was commenced by a reduction the first day from eighty