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about the setting in of the hottest season wholly retired: on which account any bad effect of the heat might be the more unmitigated. Another symptom, viz. what in my ignorance I call internal rheumatism (sometimes affecting the shoulders, &c., but more often appearing to be seated in the stomach), seemed again less probably attributable to the opium or the want of opium than to the dampness of the house[1] which I inhabit, which had about that time attained its maximum—July having been, as usual, a month of incessant rain in our most rainy part of England.
Under these reasons for doubting whether opium had any connexion with the latter
- ↑ In saying this I mean no disrespect to the individual house, as the reader will understand when I tell him that, with the exception of one or two princely mansions and some few inferior ones that have been coated with Roman cement, I am not acquainted with any house in this mountainous district which is wholly water-proof. The architecture of books, I flatter myself, is conducted on just principles in this county: but for any other architecture—it is in a barbarous state; and, what is worse, in a retrograde state.
