It
seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course into which
he finally drifted. The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid
gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place
to a specific one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like
the daughters of the horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the
last, this craving became, in De Quincey's solemn belief, an animal
incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the following fashion:--It
is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either for the fact
of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's
conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion
of each meal as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller,
just as a voracious Greek or Roman would have attributed no small part
of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as eating by proxy through the
mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case reported of
Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever
he ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his
left leg.
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