Another doctor in _The Moonstone_ tells us that the ignorant distrust of opium in England spreads through all classes, so much so, that every doctor in large practice finds himself every now and then obliged to deceive his patients by giving them opium under a disguise. He himself claims that opium saved his life. He suffered from an incurable internal complaint, but he was determined to live in order to provide for a person very dear to him. ‘To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted for a respite of many years from my sentence of death.’ Like Collins, Dickens was keenly interested in the possibilities of opium. Collins himself was a lavish consumer of the drug, but I do not think it has been suggested that Dickens himself ever touched it. Nor is it likely, for Dickens with all his tenseness of nerve was an eminently self-controlled and temperate man. But in _Edwin Drood_ he has inserted a sentence in praise of opium. The opium woman says to Datchery: ‘It’s opium, deary. Neither more nor less. And it’s like a human creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said against it, but seldom what can be said in its praise.’ The last sentence was an afterthought on the part of Dickens. It has been written in. As to whether Jasper was made ultimately to repeat his crime in any fashion under the influence of opium, it is impossible to say. He was unquestionably more or less under the influence of the drug when he committed it. The literary men of Dickens’s period were much interested in the action of drugs, in mesmerism, and the like. Elliotson, to whom _Pendennis_ is dedicated, was on intimate terms with Dickens. Dickens plainly implies that Crisparkle went to the weir because Jasper willed him to do so. Collins and Dickens were both addicted to calling witnesses to their accuracy. At the close of _Armadale_, Collins says: ‘Wherever the story touches on questions connected with law, medicine, or chemistry, it has been submitted before publication to the experience of professional men. The kindness of a friend supplied me with a plan of the doctor’s apparatus—I saw the chemical ingredients at work before I ventured on describing the action of them in the closing scenes of this book.’ Every one remembers the ‘spontaneous combustion’ preface to Bleak House. I do not know whether any medical man can be found to confirm the science of _Armadale_, or of _Bleak House_, or of _The Moonstone_. But that is not the question before us. We have only to do with what the novelist himself believed to be a scientific possibility. In _Kenilworth_ {200} Wayland compounds ‘the true Orvietan, that noble medicine which is so seldom found genuine and effective within these realms of Europe.’ Scott adds a note: ‘Orvietan, or Venice treacle, as it is sometimes called, was understood to be a sovereign remedy against poison; and the reader must be contented, for the time he peruses these pages, to hold the same