Fionnuala’s Reviews > Confessions of an English Opium Eater > Status Update

"The architecture of books, I flatter myself, is inducted on just principles in this country; but for any other architecture, it is a barbarous state, and what is worse, in a retrograde state."

Another symptom..internal rheumatism..seemed again less probably attributable to the opium..than to the dampness of the house. In saying this I mean no disrespect to the house as the reader will understand when I tell him that with the exception of one or two princely mansions and some few inferior ones coated with Roman cement I am not acquainted with any house in this mountainous district which is wholly waterproof

"I know not whether my reader is aware that many children have a power of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms. In some that power is simply a mechanical affection of the eye; others have a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to summon them; or, as a child once said to me, "I can tell them to go, and they go, but sometimes they come when I don't tell tell them to come."

At any rate, he who summons me to send out a large freight of self-denial upon my voyage of moral improvement must make it clear that the concern is hopeful, it cannot be supposed that I have much energy to spare, in fact I find it all little enough for the intellectual labours I have on my hands, let no man expect to frighten me by a few hard words into embarking any part of it upon desperate adventures of morality

"I myself used to find that half a dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the faculties...and certainly it is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man that he is 'disguised' in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised in sobriety, and it is when they are drinking...that men display themselves in their true complexion of character, which surely is not disguising themselves."

"I know not what he was: he was an ill-looking fellow, but not therefore of necessity ill-meaning; or if he were, I suppose he thought that no person sleeping out-of-doors in winter could be worth robbing. In which conclusion, however, as it regarded myself, I beg to assure him, if he should be among my readers, that he was mistaken."
Dickens must have read this, orphans, peripatetics, odd characters of every sort..

"He was one of those anomalous practitioners in lower departments of the law who..deny themselves the luxury of...a conscience...in many walks of life a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage; and just as people talk of 'laying down' their carriages, so I suppose my friend Mr--- had 'laid down' his conscience for a time, meaning, doubtless, to resume it as soon as he could afford it."

"Hence it is that children of bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man from all contact with the οι πολλοι."
Latin and Greek in one sentence! I wonder if this is oneofthefirstuses of 'hoi polloi' in an English text?