The same year he writes to a friend suffering from a chronic disorder, and records the trial of Bang--"the powder of the leaves of a kind of hemp that grows in the hot climates. It is prepared, and I believe used, in all parts of the east, from Morocco to China. In Europe it is found to act very differently on different constitutions. Some it elevates in the extreme; others it renders torpid, and scarcely observant of any evil that may befall them. In Barbary it is always taken, if it can be procured, by criminals condemned to suffer amputation, and it is said to enable those miserables to bear the rough operations of an unfeeling executioner more than we Europeans can the keen knife of our most skillful chirurgeons:
"We will have a fair trial of Bang. Do bring down some of the Hyoscyamine pills, and I will give a fair trial to Opium, Henbane, and Nepenthe. By the bye, I always considered Homer's account of the Nepenthe as a _Banging_ lie."
In September, 1803, he gives a gloomy account of his condition. It seems probable that at this time his use of opium must have become habitual:
"For five months past my mind has been strangely shut up. I have taken the paper with the intention to write to you many times, but it has been one blank feeling--one blank idealess feeling. I had nothing to say--could say nothing. How dearly I love you, my very dreams make known to me. I will not trouble you with the gloomy tale of my health. When I am awake, by patience, employment, effort of mind, and walking, I can keep the fiend at arm's-length, but the night is my Hell! sleep my tormenting Angel. Three nights out of four I fall asleep, struggling to lie awake, and my frequent night-screams have almost made me a nuisance in my own house. Dreams with me are no shadows, but the very calamities of my life.
"In the hope of drawing the gout, if gout it should be, into my feet, I walked, previously to my getting into the coach at Perth, 263 miles in eight days, with no unpleasant fatigue. My head is equally strong; but acid or not acid, gout or not gout, something there is in my stomach.
"To diversify this dusky letter, I will write an _Epitaph_, which I composed in my sleep for myself while dreaming that I was dying. To the best of my recollection I have not altered a word: