Page:Confessions of an English opium-eater (IA confessionsofeng00dequrich).pdf/207

 no interval: to do this with minuteness enough to make the review of any use—would be indeed "infandum renovare dolorem," and possibly without a sufficient motive: for 2dly, I doubt whether this latter state be any way referable to opium—positively considered, or even negatively; that is, whether it is to be numbered amongst the last evils from the direct action of opium, or even amongst the earliest evils consequent upon a want of opium in a system long deranged by its use. Certainly one part of the symptoms might be accounted for from the time of year (August): for, though the summer was not a hot one, yet in any case the sum of all the heat funded (if one may say so) during the previous months, added to the existing heat of that month, naturally renders August in its better half the hottest part of the year: and it so happened that the excessive perspiration, which even at Christmas attends any great reduction in the daily quantum of opium—and which in July was so violent as to oblige me to use a bath five or six times a day, had