o 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.

I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium-eater,
and have suffered, very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintances,
from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which
I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice
purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable
excitement. This, however, is a misrepresentation of my case. It was not
for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the
severest degree, that I first began to use opium as an article of daily
diet.

The calamities of my novitiate in London, w