ions. 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. In
the twenty-eighth year of my age a most painful affection of the stomach,
which I had first experienced about ten years before, attacked me in
great strength. This affection had originally been caused by extremities
of hunger, suffered in my boyish days. During the season of hope and
redundant happiness which succeeded (that is, from eighteen to twenty-
four) it had slumbered; for the three following years it had revived at
intervals; and now, under unfavourable circumstances, from depression of
spirits, it attacked me with a violence that yielded to no remedies but
opium. As the youthful sufferings which first produced this derangement
of the stomach were interesting in themselves, and in the circumstances
that attended them, I shall here briefly retrace them.

My father died when I was about seven years old, and left me to the care
of four guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small; and
was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for
my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease; and at
fifteen my command of that language was so great that I not only composed
Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek fluently and
without embarrassment--an accomplishment which I have not since met with
in any scholar of my times, and which in my case was owing to the
practice of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could
furnish _extempore_; for the necessity of ransacking my memory and
invention for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions as
equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of things, &c., gave me a
compass of diction which would never have been called out by a dull
translation of moral essays, &c. "That boy," said one of my masters,
pointing the attention of a stranger to me, "that boy could harangue an
Athenian mob better than you and I could address an English one." He who
honoured me with this eulogy was a scholar, "and a ripe and a good one,"
and of all my tutors was the only one whom I loved or reverenced.
Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy man's
great indignation), I was transferred to the care, first of a blockhead,
who was in a perpetual panic lest I should expose his ignorance; and
finally to that of a resp