Whatever other causes there may have been for the break-down, the opium-eating habit must have been chiefly responsible. That habit had been formed by De Quincey in 1804 in one of those visits of his to London which, with visits to other places, are to be understood as having varied the monotony of his Oxford residence. The habit had grown upon him in his solitude in his college rooms; and part of the college tradition respecting his break-down is that, having taken a large dose of the drug to stimulate him sufficiently for the first day's examination, he was wrecked by the reaction. He took no University degree; and, though his name remained on the college books to as late as 15th December 1810, his real connexion with Oxford ceased in 1808.--D. M. CHAPTER II GERMAN STUDIES AND KANT IN PARTICULAR[15] [15] From _Tait's Magazine_ for June 1836. See _ante_, Preface, pp. 1, 2.--M. Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory, and the inevitable suggestions of the context, furnish a dictionary _pro hac vice_. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are obliged to forgo such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing addition, succession, exception, inference--in short, of all the forms by which transition or connexion is effected (_if_, _but_, _and_, _therefore_, _however_, _notwithstanding_), together with all those adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential frame-work or _extra-linear_ machinery of human thought. The filling-up--the _matter_ (in a scholastic sense)--may differ infinitely; but the _form_, the periphery, the determining moulds into which this matter is fused--all this is the same for ever: and so wonderfully limited in its extent is this frame-work, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connexions among human thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all the [Greek: epea pteroenta][16] which express them. To have mastered these [Greek: epea pteroenta] is in effect to have mastered seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament, on occasion of a long journey performed in "_muggy_" weather, and in the inside of some venerable "old heavy"--such as used to bestow their tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty