At this time, too, Thompson made the acquaintance of De Quincey, "his very own De Quincey," a writer to whose career Thompson's in many respects bears an extraordinary resemblance. De Quincey naturally drew his attention to opium, with disastrous results. Opium-eating was in the air of Manchester, the cotton-spinners being much addicted to its use, and Thompson became a victim. With a short interval he was a user of opium to the end of his days. It is difficult to estimate the effect of the drug habit on Thompson's writings; personally, I doubt that it had any effect. It certainly had no direct effect, for we have his own solemn assurance that none of his published verse (except one poem, _The Dream Tryst_) was written under its influence. In fact, his first outburst of poetry came apparently as a result of his temporary breaking-off of the drug habit, after he had been rescued from the London streets; and during the few years of his poetic productiveness he seems to have freed himself from the influence of opium. Thompson thought too highly of poetry and of his mission as a poet to use opium as a stimulus to verse-making. In the latter years of his life he went back again to the drug as a relief from incessant physical weakness and misery, and who that has not suffered equally can blame him? But though opium affected Thompson's genius little, if at all, it certainly affected his character, and made whatever was weak and slack, weaker and slacker. He proved a complete failure at Owen's College, and was given a trial at Glasgow with similar results. His father was in despair. Hundreds of pounds from his scanty income had been spent for lectures to which his son had not listened, for the fees of examiners who got no papers to examine, and for courses in dissection during which Francis had not been once to the dissecting table. Opium, however, cannot be blamed for Thompson's failure; he must have failed anyway; it only made his failure more complete and hopeless. On the other hand, it had undoubtedly in one way a beneficial physical effect. On this subject his biographer remarks: "It staved off the assaults of tuberculosis; it gave him the wavering strength that made life just possible for him, whether on the streets, or through all those other distresses and discomforts that it was his character deeply to resent, but not to remove by any normal courses."