however, over whose nerves it spreads only a delightful calm, whose
feelings it tranquillizes, and in whom it produces an habitual state
of reverie, are those who should be upon their guard lest the drug to
which in suffering they owe so much should become in time the direst
of curses. Persons of the first description need little caution, for
they are rarely injured by opium. Those of the latter class, who have
already become enslaved by the habit, will find many things in these
pages that are in harmony with their own experience; other things they
will doubtless find of which they have had no experience. Many of the
particular effects of opium differ according to the different
constitutions of those who use it. In De Quincey it exhibited its
power in gorgeous dreams in consequence of some special tendency in
that direction in De Quincey's temperament, and not because dreaming
is by any means an invariable attendant upon opium-eating. Different
races also seem to be differently affected by its use. It seldom,
perhaps never, intoxicates the European; it seems habitually to
intoxicate the Oriental. It does not generally distort the person of
the English or American opium-eater; in the East it is represented as
frequently producing this effect.

It is doubtful whether a sufficient number of cases of excess in
opium-eating or of recovery from the habit have yet been recorded, or
whether such as have been recorded have been so collated as to warrant
a positive statement as to all the phenomena attendant upon its use or
its abandonment. A competent medical man, uniting a thorough
knowledge of his profession with educated habits of generalizing
specific facts under such laws--affecting the nervous, digestive, or
secretory system--as are recognized by medical science, might render
good service to humanity by teaching us properly to discriminate in
such cases between what is uniform and what is accidental. In the