ry in any thing more important than mere accidental anachronisms
and anatopisms? do I make an untrue delineation of character, blackening
the good, or white-washing the wicked? Do I not, by introducing Nero's
three greatest crimes so near upon his assassination, merely accelerate
the interval between causes and effect? And is not tragic dignity
justified in varnishing, with other compost than the dregs of Rome, the
exit of the last true Caesar of the Augustan family? For all the rest,
good manager, provide me actors, and I am even now uncertain--such is my
weakness--whether this skeleton might not at some time be clad with
flesh and skin, and a decent Roman toga. I fear it will yet haunt me as
a '_Midsummer Night's Dream_,' destroying my quiet with involuntary
shreds and patches of long-metred blank; the notion is still vivacious,
albeit scotched: Alexandrine though the synopsis appear, it must not be
thrown on the highroad as a dead snake; nay, let me cherish it yet on my
hearth, and not hurl it away like a _bonum waviatum_; a little more
boiling up of Roman messes in my brain, and my tragedy might flow forth
spontaneously as lava. What if this book be, after all, a sort of
pilot-balloon, to show my huge Nassau the way the wind blows--a feeler
as to which and which may please? Whether or not this be so, I will
still confess on, emptying my brain of booklets, and, if by happy
possibility I can keep my secret, shall hear unsuspected, friend, _your_
verdict.

* * * * *

I must rather hope, than expect, that my next bit of possible authorship
is not like the last, a subject forestalled. Scribbling as I find myself
for very listlessness in a dull country-house, there's not a publisher's
index within thirty miles; so, for lack of evidence to the contrary, I
may legitimately, for at least a brief period of self-delusion, imagine
the intoxicating field my own. And yet so fertile, important,
interesting a subject, cannot have been quite overlooked by the corps of
professed literary labourer's: the very title-page would insure five
thousand readers (especially with a Brunswicker death's-head and
marrow-bones added underneath).

OPIUM;

A HISTORY;

standing alone in single blackiness: Opium, a magnificent theme,
warranted to fill a huge octavo: and certain, from sheer variety of
information, to lead into the captivity of admiring criticism minds of
every calibre. Its natural history, w