rongheaded, but incurably obstinate in his
prejudices, who treated the whole body of medical men as ignorant
pretenders, knowing absolutely nothing of the system which they
professed to superintend. This, you will remark, is no very singular
case. No; nor, as we believe, is the antagonist case of ascribing to
such men magical powers. Nor, what is worse still, the co-existence of
both cases in the same mind, as in fact happened here. For this same
obstinate friend of ours, who treated all medical pretensions as the
mere jest of the universe, every third day was exacting from his own
medical attendants some exquisite _tour-de-force_, as that they should
know or should do something, which, if they _had_ known or done, all
men would have suspected them reasonably of magic. He rated the whole
medical body as infants; and yet what he exacted from them every third
day as a matter of course, virtually presumed them to be the only
giants within the whole range of science. Parallel and equal is the
contradiction of Coleridge. He speaks of opium excess, his own excess,
we mean--the excess of twenty-five years--as a thing to be laid aside
easily and for ever within seven days; and yet, on the other hand, he
describes it pathetically, sometimes with a frantic pathos, as the
scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight which had desolated his
life.

This shocking contradiction we need not press. All readers will see
_that_. But some will ask--was Mr Coleridge right in either view?
Being so atrociously wrong in the first notion, (viz. that the opium
of twenty-five years was a thing easily to be forsworn,) where a child
could know that he was wrong, was he even altogether right, secondly,
in believing that his own life, root and branch, had been withered by
opium? For it will not follow, because, with a relation to happiness
and tranquillity, a man may have found opium his curse, that
therefore, as a creature of energies and great purposes, he must have
been the wreck which he seems to suppose. Opium gives and takes away.
It defeats the _steady_ habit of exertion, but it creates spasms of
irregular exertion; it ruins the natural power of life, but it
developes preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power.

Let us ask of any man who holds that not Coleridge himself but the
world, as interested in Coleridge's usefulness, has suffered by his
addiction to opium; whether he is aware of the way in which opium
affected Coleridge; and second