ABSTRACT
The intellectual atmosphere engendered by the fumes of opium is but a confused commixture of sunshine and cloud, which, when intervening between the eye that surveys and the object contemplated, presents a picture as exaggerated or distorted in its proportions as it is confused and grotesque in its colorings. The soi-disant ethicist and quixotic epicurean, pseudo-penitent and rampant voluptuary combined, who could talk of opium as “an accursed thing entailing evils worse than death,” yet, as if resolved on straining physical endurance to its extreme tension, seemed bent on making a ubiquitous acquaintance with narcotics and stimuli of every name. Robert Hall, driven to opium as a resource against nervous derangement and general physical prostration, should, in view of his reluctant surrendry to one evil as against a greater, be accounted an exceptional case rather.
