himself แ one of the corps littérataire;" and says that the following writers were in 1821-2-3 "amongst his collaborateurs" in the 'London Magazine'-Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, Hood, Hamilton, Reynolds, Carey. In his Noctes Ambrosianæ,' Christopher North says that the magazine failed because De Quincey's papers were glaringly superior to the other contributions-a whimsical gibe at the other contributors. A performance of his in the autumn of 1824 may be mentioned as showing how thoroughly he had identified himself with the literary brotherhood. It was, as he says, "the most complete literary hoax that ever can have been perpetrated." A German bookseller had published a novel in German under the title of Walladmoor,' professing that it was a translation from Sir Walter Scott. De Quincey reviewed the pseudotranslation hurriedly, and spoke of it in rather high terms, chance having directed him to the only tolerable passages in the work. Thereupon a London firm conceived the idea of translating it, and employed De Quincey as translator. When he came to go through the work in detail, he found it, as he says, "such 'almighty' nonsense (to speak transatlantice)" that translating it was out of the question; and accordingly he rewrote the greater part of it. All the same, his composition was given to the English world as a translation from the German. His dedication of the performance to the German forger is a very fine piece of humour. His industry in London does not seem to have been sufficiently rewarded to relieve him from his embarrassments. In a letter to Professor Wilson, dated from London, 1825, he expresses himself as being in dread of apprehension for debt.

After 1825 his literary activity was directed almost entirely to Edinburgh. He was probably drawn there by his friendship with Wilson. In 1826 he began, in 'Blackwood's Magazine,' a series of papers under the title of "Gallery of German Prose Classics;" but opium-eaters, as he said, "though good fellows upon the whole, never finish anything"-and the Gallery never received more than two celebrities, Lessing and Kant, the series ending with the third instalment. From 1825 to 1849 he wrote a great deal for 'Blackwood,' contributing altogether about fifty papers that have been reprinted, three or four sometimes upon one subject. Among the most famous of these 'Blackwood' papers were- "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts" (1827), "Toilette of a Hebrew Lady" (1828), "Dr Parr and his Contemporaries, or Whiggism in its Relations to Literature" (1831), "The Cæsars" (1832-3-4), "The Essenes" (1840), "On Style" (1840-1), "Homer and the Homerida" (1841), "Coleridge and Opium-Eating" (1845), "Suspiria de Profundis" (1845), "The Mail-Coach," and "The Vision of Sudden Death" (1849).

In 1834 he formed another very fertile literary connection,

becoming a contributor to 'Tait's Magazine.' This connection is better known than his earlier and longer-continued connection with Blackwood, because his papers were not anonymous, but bore either his own name or the well-known alias, "The English Opium-Eater." He contributed very regularly up to 1841, and again in 1845 and 1846. He sent in altogether nearly fifty separate papers, of which about two-thirds have been reprinted. The most famous were his "Sketches of Life and Manners, from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater," contributed at intervals up to 1841. For some unexplained reason, not more than one-half of these have been reprinted. About thirty of his contributions to 'Tait' were personal reminiscences. These are represented in his collected works by two volumes-Autobiographic Sketches' (vol. xiv.) and Recollections of the Lakes' (vol. ii.) Apart from these, his best-known papers in 'Tait' were "A Tory's Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism" (1835-36).

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Little seems to be known about his place of residence from 1830 to 1843. Up to 1829 he lived chiefly at Grasmere. He spent the year 1830 with Professor Wilson in Edinburgh. In 1835 he gave his cottage at Grasmere. In 1843 he settled with his family at Lasswade, a small village near Edinburgh. It is probably to this interval that we must refer Mr John Hill Burton's somewhat overdone sketch of his habits and personal appearance in the 'BookHunter,' where De Quincey appears as "Thomas Papaverius," a "mighty book-hunter."

During 1842-3-4 he sent nothing to Tait,' and very little to 'Blackwood; and in 1844 appeared the only work of his that first saw the light as an independent book-'The Logic of Political Economy.' It is not a complete exposition of political economy, but, as the title imports, of certain first principles-the doctrines of value, market-value, wages, rent, and profits.

As in the case of Macaulay, Carlyle, and others, his scattered contributions to periodical literature were first republished in America. The collection was begun by the firm of Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, Boston, in 1852, without the author's knowledge; but the publishers generously made him a sharer in the profits of the publication, and he ultimately gave his assistance to the work of collecting the scattered papers. The first English edition, "in fourteen volumes crown 8vo, was published by Messrs Hogg of Edinburgh, during the eight years 1853-60; and all the papers it contained, with the exception of a few in the last volume, enjoyed the author's revision and correction."

His last productions were some papers on China, contributed to 'Titan' (a continuation of 'Hogg's Instructor') in 1856-57. They are not included in his collected works, but are republished separately.

He died at Edinburgh, December 8, 1859, in his seventy-fifth year.

We have several descriptions of De Quincey's personal appearance. He was a slender little man, with small, clearly chiselled features, a large head, and a remarkably high, square forehead. "In addition," says Professor Masson, "to the general impression of his diminutiveness and fragility, one was struck with the peculiar beauty of his head and forehead, rising disproportionately high over his small, wrinkly visage, and gentle, deep-set eyes." There was a peculiarly high and regular arch in the wrinkles of his brow, which was also slightly contracted. The lines of his countenance fell naturally into an expression of mild suffering, of endurance sweetened by benevolence, or, according to the fancy of the interpreter, of gentle, melancholy sweetness. All that met him seem to have been struck with the measured, silvery, yet somewhat hollow and unearthly, tones of his voice, the more impressive that the flow of his talk was unhesitating and unbroken.

"Although a man considerably under height and slender of form, he was capable of undergoing great fatigue, and took constant exercise." His having been the travelling companion of Christopher North about the English lakes is a sufficient certificate. The weak point in his bodily system, as he frequently tells us, was his stomach. This weakness he often pleads as the justification of his opium-eating. Opium was "the sole remedy potent enough to control his distress and irritability." He sometimes humorously exaggerates his infirmity. "A more worthless body than his own, the author is free to confess, cannot be. It is his pride to believe that it is the very ideal of a base, crazy, despicable human system, that hardly ever could have been meant to be seaworthy for two days under the ordinary storms and wear and tear of life; and, indeed, if that were the creditable way of disposing of human bodies, he must own that he should almost be ashamed to bequeath his wretched structure to any respectable dog."

As often happens,1 the impoverishment of certain bodily organs was accompanied, if not caused, by an enormous and disproportionate activity of intellect. It may be doubted whether we have ever seen in this quarter of the globe a man so completely absorbed in mental operations, and so far removed from our ordinary way of looking at the world. He resembled the contemplative sages of India more than the intellectual men of rough, practical England.

1 "In general," says our author, " a man has reason to think himself well off in the great lottery of this life if he draws the prize of a healthy stomach without a mind, or the prize of a fine intellect with a crazy stomach; but that any man should draw both is truly astonishing, and, I suppose, happens only once in a century."

Of no man can it be absolutely true that he does nothing but observe, read, meditate, imagine, and communicate the results; but this may be affirmed of De Quincey with a nearer approach to truth than it can be affirmed of any other great name in our literature.

In reading his works, one of the first things that strike us is the extreme multifariousness of his knowledge. When we compare him even with writers of a high order, we cannot help being astonished at the force of a memory that could hold so much in readiness for immediate use. He was noted for conversational powers; and, as he himself explains, one of his peculiar advantages for conversation was "a prodigious memory" and "an inexhaustible fertility of topics."

In his writings this retentive capacity often makes us pause and wonder. For some of his most curious freaks of scholarship, indeed, his "Toilette of a Hebrew Lady" and his "Casuistry of Roman Meals," he took most of the materials at second-hand from the German. Still, if we were to assemble all his digressions, quotations, notes, and allusions, we should be sufficiently convinced of the immense and eccentric range of his reading, and at the same time of his tenacious hold of what he had read. Indeed, if we were to make such a collection, we should be no less astonished at the extent of another field of his memory. We should find that he was a close observer of human character, and that he noted and remembered characteristic peculiarities and expressions of feeling with Boswellian minuteness. In the course of his wanderings he met persons of all ranks and conditions, and he seldom mentions a name without giving some characteristic particulars of the person.

Then, as regards the other great intellectual force the power of recovering analogous circumstances or detecting hidden resemblances-De Quincey had a very remarkable, perhaps a still more remarkable, endowment. Speaking of his conversational powers, he says that in addition to the advantage of a prodigious memory, he had “the far greater advantage of a logical instinct for feeling in a moment the secret analogies or parallelisms that connected things else apparently remote." And again, writing of his powers of memory, he says, "I mention this in no spirit of boasting. Far from it; for, on the contrary, amongst my mortifications have been compliments to my memory, when, in fact, any compliment that I had merited was due to the higher faculty of an electric aptitude for seizing analogies, and, by means of those aerial pontoons, passing over like lightning from one topic to another.” 1 This power appears in his writings in several shapes. The quotations and allusions that show his wide knowledge of books and men are very obvious signs of the activity of his analogical faculty. His numerous illustrations, and the metaphorical cast of his language are no

1 Blackwood's Magazine, April 1845.

less striking. Less obtrusive evidences of the faculty, but still more valuable as being evidences of its strength, are his power of breaking through routine views, and the ingenious plausibility of his arguments. He very rarely assumes a traditional view without some note of exception, and this evidently not from a rough love of paradox-as is sometimes alleged by careless readers-but from his strong and delicate sensibility to the exact relations of things. Nothing can be more exquisite than his subtlety in distinguishing wherein things agree and wherein they differ-in what respects a traditional view is warrantable, and in what respects it is erroneous. Equally charming to the lover of intellectual subtlety are his deliberate arrays of argument in support of a favourite thesis, as seen in such performances as his paper on the Essenes, or his attempt to whitewash the character of Judas Iscariot. His skill in urging every circumstance favourable to his opinion, and in explaining away everything that bears against it, gives to the English reader an idea of elaborate ingenuity not to be obtained from any other of our recognised "leaders of literature."

Were De Quincey's writings the outcome of nothing more generally attractive than profound erudition, intellectual subtlety, and powers of copious expression, they would not have taken such a hold of public interest. But he was not an arid philosopher, a modern Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. He tells us that he read "German metaphysicians, Latin schoolmen, thaumaturgic Platonists, and religious Mystics," but he tells us also that at one time "a tremendous hold was taken of his entire sensibilities by our own literature." Though he "well knew that his proper vocation was the exercise of the analytic understanding," he spent perhaps the greater part of his time in the exercise of the imagination, taking profound delight in "the sublimer and more passionate poets," in "the grand lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in 'Paradise Regained.'"

He described himself as a Eudæmonist or Hedonist-averse to everything that did not bring him immediate enjoyment; and this half-humorous description may be allowed, if we take care not to forget that his enjoyments were of a peculiar nature. His pleasures were not boisterous-not dependent upon a flow of animal spirits. He was an intellectual Hedonist, or pleasure - seeker. During a considerable part of his time he was rapt in his favourite studies, in works of the analytic understanding, of history, and of imagination. But even in daily life, in intercourse with the world, his imagination seems to have been preternaturally active. He was a close observer of character, as we can see both from his works and from the testimony of those that knew him. But, as we also know from both sources, his imagination was constantly active in shaping his surroundings into objects of refined pleasure,