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not more than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, in my family, the drawing-room; but, being contrived "a double debt to pay," it is also, and more justly, termed the library; for it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbors. Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can into this room. Make it populous with books, and furthermore, paint me a good fire; and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table; and (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one, such a stormy night) place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray; and if you know how to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal tea-pot, -à parte ante, and à parte post; for I usually drink tea from eight o'clock at night to four in the morning. And, as it is very unpleasant to make tea, or to pour it out for one's self, paint me a lovely young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's; - but no, dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to something more within its power; and the next article brought forward should naturally be myself, a picture of the Opium-eater, with his little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug" lying beside him on the table. As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that, though I

would rather see the original; you may paint it if you choose but I apprize you that no "little" receptacle would even in 1816, answer my purpose, who was at a distance from the "stately Pantheon," and all druggists (mortal or otherwise). No: you may as well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a wine decanter as possible. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-colored laudanum; that, and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighborhood; but as to myself, there I demur. I admit that, naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground of the picture; that being the hero of the piece, or, (if you choose) the criminal at the bar, my body should be had into court. This seems reasonable; but why should I confess, on this point, to a painter? or, why confess at all? If the public) into whose private ear I am confidentially whispering my confessions, and not into any painter's) should chance to have framed some agreeable picture for itself of the Opium-eater's exterior,- should have ascribed to him, romantically, an elegant person, or a handsome face, why should I barbarously tear from it so pleasing a delusion,— pleasing both to the public and to me? No: paint me, if at all, according to your own fancy; and, as a painter's fancy should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail, in that way, to be a gainer. And now, reader, we have run through all the ten categories of my condition, as it stood about 1816 -1817, up to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to have been a happy man; and the elements of that happiness I have endeavored to place before you, in the above sketch of the interior of a scholar's library,

in a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter evening.

But now farewell, a long farewell, to happiness, winter or summer! farewell to smiles and laughter! farewell to peace of mind! farewell to hope and tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolations of sleep! For more than three years and a half I am summoned away from these; I am how arrived at an Iliad of woes.

XIII.

FIRST PLUNGE INTO AUTHORDOM.

IN 1821, when I went up to London, avowedly for the purpose of exercising my pen, as the one sole source then open to me for extricating myself from a special embarassment, (failing which case of dire necessity, I believe that I should never have written a line for the press ;) I obtained an introduction, from Mr. Talfourd, to Messrs. Taylor and Hersey, who had very recently purchased "The London Magazine," and were themselves joint editors of that journal.

The terms they held out to contributors were ultramunificent, more so than had yet been heard of in any quarter whatsoever; and upon that understandingseeing that money was just then of necessity, the one sole object to which I looked in the cultivation of literature,― naturally enough it happened that to them I offered my earliest paper, viz., "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.'

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The London Magazine was at that time brilliantly supported and, in 1821-23, amongst my own collaboCharles Lamb; Hazlitt; Allan Cunningham; Hood; Hamilton Reynolds; Carey, the unrivalled translator of Dante; Crow, the Public Orator of Oxford. Certainly a literary Pleiad might have been gathered out of the stars connected with this journal.

In London I lived in the most austere retirement; and the few persons whom I saw occasionally, or whose hospitalities I received, were gens de plume, and professedly of my own order as practising literati, but of the highest pretensions.

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