I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period of my life. According to my application of it, I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. In _that_ hope it is that I have drawn it up, and _that_ must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honorable reserve which for the most part restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Guilt and misery shrink by a natural instinct from public notice: they court privacy and solitude; and, even in the choice of a grave, will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the church-yard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing--in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth-- 'Humbly to express A penitential loneliness.' It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all that it should be so; nor would I willingly, in my own person, manifest a disregard of such salutary feelings, nor in act or word do any thing to weaken them. But on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting to others from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price might compensate, by a vast over-balance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply guilt. They approach or recede from the shades of that dark alliance in proportion to the probable motives and prospects of the offender, and the palliations, known or secret, of the offense; in proportion as the temptations to it were potent from the first, and the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest to the last. For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been on the whole the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature; and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet _recorded_ [Footnote: "Not yet _recorded_," I say; for there is one celebrated man of the present day [Coleridge] who, if all be true which is reported of him, has greatly exceeded me in quantity.] of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthrallment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man--have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist that, in my case, the self-conquest was unquestionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts of casuistry, according as that name