ROBERT HALL - JOHN RANDOLPH - WM. WILBERFORCE,

The compiler has hesitated as to the propriety of calling attention to the opium-habits of these eminent men, both because little instruction is afforded by the meagre information that is accessible to him respecting their use of opium, and because he apprehends their example may be pleaded in extenuation of the habit. Yet they were confirmed opium-eaters, and remained such to the day of their death; and a reference to their cases may not be without its lesson to that large class of men eminent in public or professional life, who already are, or are in danger of becoming, victims of the opium tyranny, as well as to that larger class who find in undiscriminating denunciations of bad habits, a cheap method of exhibiting a cheap philanthropy.

ROBERT HALL.

With the single exception of Richard Baxter, no clergyman of eminence on record appears to have suffered so acutely or for so long a period from nervous disorders as this eloquent divine. So little, unfortunately, is known of the nature of his disorder, that it would be unjust to express any opinion as to the urgency of the temptation which drove him to the enormous consumption of opium in which he indulged. His biography by Olinthus Gregory sufficiently indicates the severity as well as the early manifestation of his painful disorder. "At about six years of age he was placed at a day-school about four miles from his father's residence. At first he walked to school in the morning and home again in the evening. But the severe pain in his back, from which he suffered so much through life, had even then begun to distress him; so that he was often obliged to lie down upon the road; and sometimes his brother and his other school-fellows carried him in turn.

"Sir James Macintosh described Mr. Hall, when in his twentieth year, as attracting notice by a most ingenuous and intelligent countenance, by the liveliness of his manners, and by such indications of mental activity as could not be misinterpreted. His appearance was that of health, yet not of robust health, and he suffered from paroxysms of pain, during which he would roll about on the carpet in the utmost agony; but no sooner had the pain subsided than he would resume his part in conversation with as much cheerfulness and vivacity as before he had been thus interrupted.

"At that period, though he was strong and active, he often suffered extremely from the pain to which I have before adverted, and which was his sad companion through life. On entering his room to commence our reading, I could at once tell whether or not his night had been refreshing; for if it had, I found him at the table, the books to be studied ready, and a vacant chair set for me. If his night had been restless, and the pain still continued, I found him lying on the sofa, or more frequently upon three chairs, on which he could obtain an easier position. At such seasons, scarcely ever did a complaint issue from his lips; but inviting me to take the sofa, our reading commenced. They, however, who knew Mr. Hall can conjecture how often, if he became interested, he would raise himself from the chairs, utter a few animated expressions, and then resume the favorite reclining posture. Sometimes, when he was suffering more than usual, he proposed a walk in the fields, where, with the appropriate book as our companion, we could pursue the subject. If he was the preceptor, as was commonly the case in these peripatetic lectures, he soon lost the sense of pain, and it was difficult to say whether the body or the mind were brought most upon the stretch in keeping up with him.

"During the early months of the year 1803, the pain in Mr. Hall's back increased both in intenseness and continuity, depriving him almost always of refreshing sleep, and depressing his spirits to an unusual degree.

"Often has he been known to sit close at his reading, or yet more intently engaged in abstract thought, for more than twelve hours in the day; so that when his friends have called upon him, in the hope of drawing him from his solitude, they have found him in such a state of nervous excitement as led them to unite their efforts in persuading him to take some mild narcotic and retire to rest. The painful result may be anticipated. This noble mind lost its equilibrium.

"Throughout the whole of Mr. Hall's residence at Leicester, he suffered much from his constitutional complaint; and neither his habit of smoking nor that of taking laudanum seemed effectually to alleviate his sufferings. It was truly surprising that this constant, severe pain, and the means adopted to mitigate it, did not in any measure diminish his mental energy.

"In 1812 he took from fifty to one hundred drops every night. Before 1826 the quantity had increased to one thousand drops.

"Mr. Hall commonly retired to rest a little before eleven o'clock; but after his first sleep, which lasted about two hours, he quitted his bed to obtain an easier position on the floor or upon three chairs, and would then employ himself in reading the book on which he had been engaged during the day. Sometimes, indeed often, the laudanum, large as the doses had become, did not sufficiently neutralize his pain to remove the necessity for again quitting his bed. For more than twenty years he had not been able to pass a whole night in bed. When this is borne in mind it is truly surprising that he wrote and published so much; nay, that he did not sink into dotage before he was fifty years of age.

"Early on the Sunday morning (Mr. Addington says) being requested to see him, I found him in a condition of extreme suffering and distress. The pain in his back had been uncommonly severe during the whole night, and compelled him to multiply at very short intervals the doses of his anodyne, until he had taken no less than 125 grains of solid opium, equal to more than 3000 drops, or nearly four ounces of laudanum!! This was the only instance in which I had ever seen him at all overcome by the soporific quality of the medicine; and it was even then hard to determine whether the effect was owing so much to the quantity administered as to the unusual circumstance of its not having proved, even for a short time, an effectual antagonist to the pain it was expected to relieve.

"The opium having failed to assuage his pain, he was compelled to remain in the horizontal posture; but while in this situation a violent attack in his chest took place, which in its turn rendered an upright position of the body no less indispensable. The struggle that ensued between these opposing and alike urgent demands became most appalling, and it was difficult to imagine that he could survive it, especially as from the extreme prostration of vital energy, the remedy by which the latter of these affections had often been mitigated - viz., bleeding - could not be resorted to. Powerful stimulants, such as brandy, opium, ether, and ammonia, were the only resources, and in about an hour from my arrival we had the satisfaction of finding him greatly relieved."

The following references to the opium habits of Hall are found in

"Gilfillan's Literary Portraits."

"Owing to a pain in his spine, he was obliged to swallow daily great quantities of ether and laudanum, not to speak of his favorite potion, tea. This had the effect of keeping him strung up always to the highest pitch; and, while never intoxicated, he was everlastingly excited. Had he been a feeble man in body and mind the regimen would have totally unnerved him. As it was, it added greatly to the natural brilliance of his conversational powers, although sometimes it appears to have irritated his temper, and to have provoked ebullitions of passion, and hasty, unguarded statements.

"A gentleman in Bradford described to us a day he once spent there with Hall. It was a day of much enjoyment and excitement. At the close of it Hall felt exceedingly exhausted, and on retiring to rest asked the landlady for a wine-glass half full of brandy. 'Now,' he says, 'I am about to take as much laudanum as would kill all this company; for if I don't, I won't sleep one moment.' He filled the glass with strong laudanum, went to bed, and enjoyed a refreshing rest."

JOHN RANDOLPH.

The eccentricities of no man in America who has been at all conspicuous in public life approach the eccentricities of the late John Randolph of Roanoke. Diseased from his birth, with a temperament of the most excitable kind, he seems during the greater part of his days to have lived only just without the bounds of confirmed insanity. His constitutional infirmities were peculiarly the infirmities that find relief in opium; and it has generally been understood that his addiction to the habit was of many years' continuance and lasted to his death. I have been assured by a Virginia gentleman that when, in one of his last days, he directed his servant to write upon a card for his inspection the word "REMORSE," Randolph was understood to have in mind his excessive use of opium. His biographer, Mr. Hugh Garland, however, has given apparently as little prominence to his habit in this respect as was consistent with any mention of it whatever. The letters which follow contain nearly all the information that we can gather from this source. Under date of February, 1817, Randolph says:

"The worst night that I have had since my indisposition commenced. It was, I believe, a case of croup combined with the affection of the liver and the lungs. Nor was it unlike tetanus, since the muscles of the neck and back were rigid, and the jaw locked. I never expected, when the clock struck two, to hear the bell again. Fortunately, as I found myself going, I dispatched a servant (about one) to the apothecary for an ounce of laudanum. Some of this, poured down my throat, through my teeth, restored me to something like life. I was quite delirious, but had method in my madness; for they tell me I ordered Juba to load my gun and to shoot the first 'doctor' that should enter the room; adding, 'they are only mustard-seed, and will serve just to sting him.' Last night I was again very sick; but the anodyne relieved me. I am now persuaded that I might have saved myself a great deal of suffering by the moderate use of opium."

Under date of March of the same year he writes to a friend: "No mitigation of my worst symptoms took place until the third day of my journey, when I threw physic to the dogs, and instead of opium, etc., I drank, in defiance of my physician's prescription, copiously of cold spring water, and ate plentifully of ice. Since that change of regimen my strength has increased astonishingly, and I have even gained some flesh, or rather skin."

In a letter to Dr. Brockenbrough, dated May 30, 1828:

"I write again to tell you that extremity of suffering has driven me to the use of what I have had a horror all my life - I mean opium - and I have derived more relief from it than I could have anticipated. I took it to mitigate severe pain, and to check the diarrhea. It has done both; but to my surprise it has had an equally good effect upon my cough, which now does not disturb me in the night, and the diarrhea seldom until toward day-break, and then not over two or three times before breakfast, instead of two or three-and-thirty times.

His biographer, speaking of the state of his health in the autumn of 1831, says, "Mr. Randolph made no secret of his use of opium at this time: 'I live by if not upon opium,' said he to a friend. He had been driven to it as an alleviation of a pain to which few mortals were doomed. He could not now dispense with its use. 'I am fast sinking,' said he, 'into an opium-eating sot, but, please God! I will shake off the incubus yet before I die; for whatever difference of opinion may exist on the subject of suicide, there can be none as to rushing into the presence of our Creator in a state of drunkenness, whether produced by opium or brandy.' To the deleterious influence of that poisonous drug may be traced many of the aberrations of mind and of conduct so much regretted by his friends during the ensuing winter and spring. But he was by no means under its constant influence."

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.

So little is known, beyond what appears in the following brief notices, of the opium habits of this distinguished philanthropist, that their citation here would be of little service to opium-eaters, except as they tend to show that the regular use of the drug in small quantities may sometimes be continued for many years without apparent injury to the health, while the same difficulty in abandoning it is experienced as attends its disuse by those whose moderation has been less marked.

The son of Wilberforce, in the "Life" of his distinguished father, says: "His returning health was in a great measure the effect of a proper use of opium, a remedy to which even Dr. Pitcairne's judgment could scarcely make him have recourse; yet it was to this medicine that he now owed his life, as well as the comparative vigor of his later years. So sparing was he always in its use, that as a stimulant he never knew its power, and as a remedy for his specific weakness he had not to increase its quantity during the last twenty years he lived. 'If I take,' he would often say,'but a single glass of wine, I can feel its effect, but I never know when I have taken my dose of opium by my feelings.' Its intermission was too soon perceived by the recurrence of disorder."

In a letter from Dr. Gilman, already quoted in the "Reminiscences of

Coleridge," he says, speaking of the difficulty of leaving off opium,

"I had heard of the failure of Mr. Wilberforce's case under an eminent

physician of Bath," etc.

A HALF CENTURY'S USE OF OPIUM.

The case of Wilberforce, however, is thrown into the shade by that of a gentleman now living in New York, whose use of opium has been much more protracted than that of the British philanthropist, and who affirms that opium, instead of weakening his powers of mind or body in any respect, has, on the contrary, been of eminent service to both. The compiler would have been glad, in the general interests of humanity, to omit any reference to this case; but it is a legitimate part of the story he has undertaken to tell; and however this isolated exception to the ordinary results of the opium habit may be perverted as a snare and delusion to others, it can not honestly remain untold. In the compiler's interview with this gentleman, now in the one hundred and third year of his age, he was impressed with the evidences of a physical and mental vigor, and a high moral tone, which is rarely found in men upon whom rests the weight of even eighty years. Whatever may be thought of the convictions of the compiler, as to the enormity of the injury inflicted upon society from the habitual and increasing use of opium, he can not reconcile it to his sense of fairness to omit distinct reference to this most anomalous case. The gentleman in question was born in England in the year 1766, and received his first commission in the army in 1786. Serving his country in almost every military station in the world where the martial drum of England is heard - in India, at the Cape, in the Canadas, on guard over Napoleon at St. Helena - he illustrates, as almost a solitary exception, the fact that a use of opium for half a century, varying in quantity from forty grains daily to many times this amount, does not inevitably impair bodily health, mental vigor, or the higher qualities of the moral nature. The use of opium was commenced by this gentleman in the year 1816, as a relief for a severe attack of rheumatism, and has been continued to the present time, with the exception of a very brief period when an eminent physician of Berlin, at the suggestion of the late Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian Embassador to Great Britain, endeavored to break up the habit. In this effort he was unsuccessful, and the case remains as a striking illustration of the weakness of that physiological reasoning which would deduce certain phenomena as the invariable consequences of a violation of the fundamental laws of health. Until the chemistry of the living body is better understood, medical science seems obliged to accept many anomalies which it can not explain. About all that can be said of such exceptional cases is this: In the great conflagrations which at times devastate large cities, some huge mass of solid masonry is occasionally seen in the midst of the wide-spread ruin, looking down upon prostrate columns, broken capitals, shattered walls, and the cinders and ashes of a general desolation. The solitary tower unquestionably stands; but its chief utility lies in this, - that it serves as a striking monument of the appalling and wide-spread destruction to which it is the sole and conspicuous exception.