The account may be continued in the son's own words:-- "Having left my mother at the inn, he walked into the town alone, and suddenly staggered in the street, and fell.
He was lifted up by the passengers" (probably from the stagecoach from which they had just alighted), "and overheard some one say significantly, 'Let the gentleman alone, he will be better by and by'; for his fall was attributed to the bottle.

He was assisted to his room, and the late Dr.Clubbe was sent for, who, after a little examination, saw through the case with great judgment.

'There is nothing the matter with your head,' he observed, 'nor any apoplectic tendency; let the digestive organs bear the whole blame: you must take opiates.' From that time his health began to amend rapidly, and his constitution was renovated; a rare effect of opium, for that drug almost always inflicts some partial injury, even when it is necessary; but to him it was only salutary--and to a constant but slightly increasing dose of it may be attributed his long and generally healthy life." The son makes no reference to any possible effects of this "slightly increasing dose" upon his father's intellect or imagination.

And the ordinary reader who knows the poet mainly through his sober couplets may well be surprised to hear that their author was ever addicted to the opium-habit; still more, that his imagination ever owed anything to its stimulus.

But in FitzGerald's copy there is a MS.