erwards peopled the dreams of the Opium-eater.

3. As creating some previous interest of a personal sort in the
confessing subject, apart from the matter of the confessions, which
cannot fail to render the confessions themselves more interesting. If a
man "whose talk is of oxen" should become an opium-eater, the probability
is that (if he is not too dull to dream at all) he will dream about oxen;
whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the
Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher; and accordingly, that
the phantasmagoria of _his_ dreams (waking or sleeping, day-dreams or
night-dreams) is suitable to one who in that character

Humani nihil a se alienum putat.

For amongst the conditions which he deems indispensable to the sustaining
of any claim to the title of philosopher is not merely the possession of
a superb intellect in its _analytic_ functions (in which part of the
pretensions, however, England can for some generations show but few
claimants; at least, he is not aware of any known candidate for this
honour who can be styled emphatically _a subtle thinker_, with the
exception of _Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, and in a narrower department of
thought with the recent illustrious exception {2} of _David Ricardo_) but
also on such a constitution of the _moral_ faculties as shall give him an
inner eye and power of intuition for the vision and the mysteries of our
human nature: _that_ constitution of faculties, in short, which (amongst
all the generations of men that from the beginning of time have deployed
into life, as it were, upon this planet) our English poets have possessed
in the highest degree, and Scottish professors {3} in the lowest.

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 acquaintance 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. True it
is that for nearly ten years I did occasionally take opium for the sake
of the exquisite pleasure it gave me; but so long as I took it with this
view I was effectually protected from all material bad consequences by
the necessity of interposing long intervals between the several acts of
indulgence, in order to renew the pleasurable sensat