Might I request you to present my best respects to Mrs. Stuart as those of an old acquaintance of yours, and, as far as I am myself conscious of, at all times with hearty affection, your sincere friend,
P. S. There are some half dozen more books of mine left at the "Courier" office, Ben Jonson and sundry German volumes. As I am compelled to sell my library,[107] you would oblige me by ordering the porter to take them to 19, London Street, Fitzroy Square; whom I will remunerate for his trouble. I should not take this liberty, but that I had in vain written to Mr. Street, requesting the same favour, which in his hurry of business I do not wonder that he forgot.
You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend's conscience, Cottle! but it is _oil of vitriol_! I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of it--not from resentment (God forbid!), but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction.
The object of my present reply is to state the case just as it is. First, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my GUILT worse, far worse than all. I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow, trembling not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. "I gave thee so many talents, what hast thou done with them?" Secondly, overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends have I stated the whole case with tears and the very bitterness of shame, but in two instances I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of the tremendous effects on myself.
Thirdly, though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair of His mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow-men I may say that I was seduced into the ACCURSED habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal, I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case (or what appeared to me so), by rubbing in of laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned, the supposed remedy was recurred to--but I cannot go through the dreary history.