The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater | Page 6

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
respectable scholar at the head of a great school on an ancient
foundation. This man had been appointed to his situation by--College,
Oxford, and was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like most men whom
I have known from that college) coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A
miserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of
my favourite master; and beside, he could not disguise from my hourly
notice the poverty and meagreness of his understanding. It is a bad
thing for a boy to be and to know himself far beyond his tutors,
whether in knowledge or in power of mind. This was the case, so far as
regarded knowledge at least, not with myself only, for the two boys,
who jointly with myself composed the first form, were better Grecians
than the head-master, though not more elegant scholars, nor at all more
accustomed to sacrifice to the Graces. When I first entered I remember
that we read Sophocles; and it was a constant matter of triumph to us,
the learned triumvirate of the first form, to see our "Archididascalus"
(as he loved to be called) conning our lessons before we went up, and
laying a regular train, with lexicon and grammar, for blowing up and
blasting (as it were) any difficulties he found in the choruses; whilst

WE never condescended to open our books until the moment of going
up, and were generally employed in writing epigrams upon his wig or
some such important matter. My two class-fellows were poor, and
dependent for their future prospects at the university on the
recommendation of the head-master; but I, who had a small patrimonial
property, the income of which was sufficient to support me at college,
wished to be sent thither immediately. I made earnest representations
on the subject to my guardians, but all to no purpose. One, who was
more reasonable and had more knowledge of the world than the rest,
lived at a distance; two of the other three resigned all their authority
into the hands of the fourth; and this fourth, with whom I had to
negotiate, was a worthy man in his way, but haughty, obstinate, and
intolerant of all opposition to his will. After a certain number of letters
and personal interviews, I found that I had nothing to hope for, not
even a compromise of the matter, from my guardian. Unconditional
submission was what he demanded,