Tobacco was not known in the Golden Age. So much the worse for the Golden Age. This age of iron and lead would be insupportable without it; and therefore we may reasonably suppose that the happiness of those better days would have been much improved by the use of it.
No man was ever scolded out of his sins. The heart, corrupt as it is, and because it is so, grows angry if it be not treated with some management and good manners, and scolds again. A surly mastiff will bear perhaps to be stroked, though he will growl even under that operation, but, if you touch him roughly, he will bite.
Simplicity is become a very rare quality in a writer. In the decline of great kingdoms, and where refinement in all the arts is carried to an excess, I suppose it is always so. The later Roman writers are remarkable for false ornament; they were without doubt greatly admired by the readers of their own day; and with respect to authors of the present era, the popular among them appear to me to be equally censurable on the same account. Swift and Addison were simple.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Thomas de Quincey, scholar, essayist, critic, opium-eater, was born at Manchester on August 15, 1785. A singularly sensitive and imaginative boy, De Quincey rapidly became a brilliant scholar, and at fifteen years of age could speak Greek so fluently as to be able, as one of his masters said, "to harangue an Athenian mob." He wished to go early to Oxford, but his guardians objecting, he ran away at the age of seventeen, and, after wandering in Wales, found his way to London, where he suffered privations that injured his health. The first instalment of his "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" appeared in the "London Magazine" for September 1821. It attracted universal attention both by its subject-matter and style. De Quincey settled in Edinburgh, where most of his literary work was done, and where he died, on December 8, 1859. His collected works, edited by Professor Masson, fill fourteen volumes. After he had passed his seventieth year, De Quincey revised and extended his "Confessions," but in their magazine form, from which this epitome is made, they have much greater freshness and power than in their later elaboration. Many popular editions are now published.
I.--The Descending Pathway
I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life, and I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. That must be my apology for breaking through the delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.
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 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.