was quickened and barbed by the certainty of so immediately meeting Lady Carbery. To her it was, and to her only, that I could look for any useful advice, or any effectual aid. She over my mother, as in turn my mother over her, exercised considerable influence; whilst my mother's power was very seldom disturbed by the other guardians. The mistress of Laxton it was, therefore, whose opinion upon the case would virtually be decisive; since, if she saw no reasonable encouragement to any contest with my guardians, I felt too surely that my own uncountenanced and unaided energies drooped too much for such an effort. Who Lady Carbery was, I will explain in my next chapter, entitled Laxton.1 Meantime, to me individually, she was the one sole friend that ever I could regard as entirely fulfilling the offices of an honourable friendship. She had known me from infancy: when I was in my first year of life, she—an orphan and a great heiress was in her tenth or eleventh ; and, on her occasional visits to "the Farm" (a rustic old house, then occupied by my father), I, a household pet, suffering under an ague, which lasted from my first year to my third, naturally fell into her hands as a sort of superior toy, a toy that could breathe and talk. Every year our intimacy had been renewed, until her marriage interrupted it. But, after no very long interval, when my mother had transferred her household to Bath, in that city we frequently met again; Lord Carbery liking Bath for itself, as well as for its easy connection with London, whilst Lady Carbery's health was supposed to benefit by the waters. Her understanding was justly reputed a fine one; but, in general, it was calculated to win respect rather than love, for it was masculine and austere, with very little toleration for sentiment or romance. But to myself she had always been indulgently kind; I was protected in her regard, beyond anybody's power to dislodge me, by her childish remembrances; and of late years she had

1 It may be well, however, to explain even at this point that George Evans, 4th Baron of Carbery, Co. Cork, born in 1766, had married in 1792 Susan, only daughter of Colonel Henry Watson, and that this lady was the Lady Carbery of whom De Quincey speaks. Though the peerage was Irish, Lord and Lady Carbery lived chiefly in England.-M.

begun to entertain the highest opinion of my intellectual promises. Whatever could be done to assist my views, I most certainly might count upon her doing; that is to say, within the limits of her conscientious judgment upon the propriety of my own plans. Having, besides, so much more knowledge of the world than myself, she might see cause to dissent widely from my own view of what was expedient as well as what was right; in which case I was well assured that, in the midst of kindness and unaffected sympathy, she would firmly adhere to the views of my guardians. In any circumstances she would have done so. But at present a new element had begun to mix with the ordinary influences which governed her estimates of things: she had, as I knew from my sister's report, become religious; and her new opinions were of a gloomy cast-Calvinistic, in fact, and tending to what is now technically known in England as "Low Church," or "Evangelical Christianity." These views, being adopted in a great measure from my mother, were naturally the same as my mother's; so that I could form some guess as to the general spirit, if not the exact direction, in which her counsels would flow. It is singular that, until this time, I had never regarded Lady Carbery under any relation whatever to female intellectual society. My early childish knowledge of her had shut out that mode of viewing her. But now, suddenly, under the new-born sympathies awakened by the scene with Miss Bl- I became aware of the distinguished place she was qualified to fill in such society. In that Eden-for such it had now consciously become to me—I had no necessity to cultivate an interest or solicit an admission; already, through Lady Carbery's too flattering estimate of my own pretensions, and through old childish memories, I held the most distinguished place. This Eden she it was that lighted up suddenly to my new-born powers of appreciation, in all its dreadful points of contrast with the killing society of schoolboys. She it was, fitted to be the glory of such an Eden, who probably would assist in banishing me for the present to the wilderness outside. My distress of mind was inexpressible. And, in the midst of glittering saloons, at times also in the midst of society the most fascinating, I-contemplating the idea of that gloomy academic dungeon to which for three

long years I anticipated too certainly a sentence of exile-felt very much as in the middle ages must have felt some victim of evil destiny, inheritor of a false fleeting prosperity, that suddenly in a moment of time, by signs blazing out past all concealment on his forehead, was detected as a leper, and in that character, as a public nuisance and universal horror, was summoned instantly to withdraw from society,-prince or peasant, was indulged with no time for preparation or evasion, and, from the midst of any society, the sweetest or the most dazzling, was driven violently to take up his abode amidst the sorrow-haunted chambers of a lazar-house.

SECTION I.-CYMON AND IPHIGENIA

My route, after parting from Lord Westport at Birmingham, lay (as perhaps I mentioned before) through Stamford to Laxton, the Northamptonshire seat of Lord Carbery. From Stamford, which I had reached by some intolerable old coach, such as in those days too commonly abused the patience and long-suffering of Young England, I took a post-chaise to Laxton. The distance was but nine miles, and the postilion drove well; so that I could not really have been long upon the road; and yet, from gloomy rumination upon the unhappy destination which I believed myself approaching within three or four months, never had I weathered a journey that seemed to me so long and dreary. As I alighted on the steps at Laxton, the first dinner-bell rang; and I was hurrying to my toilet, when my sister Mary, who had met me in the portico, begged me first of all to come into Lady Carbery's dressing-room, her ladyship having something special to communicate, which related (as I understood her) to one Simon.

1 The only original that I have found for this long and very interesting chapter of the Autobiography is in a mere scrap of that paper in Tait's Magazine for August 1834 which furnished the matter of the last chapter. The scrap consists of two meagre paragraphs inserted there registering a visit to Laxton as one of the incidents of the first month or two of De Quincey's life in England after his return from Ireland in the end of 1800. The expansion of that original in the present chapter is remarkable.-M.

"What Simon? Simon Peter?" O no, you irreverent boy; no Simon at all with an S, but Cymon with a C-Dryden's Cymon

'That whistled as he went for want of thought.'"

This one indication was a key to the whole explanation that followed. The sole visitors, it seemed, at that time to Laxton, beside my sister and myself, were Lord and Lady Massey.1 They were understood to be domesticated at Laxton for a very long stay. In reality, my own private construction of the case (though unauthorized by anything ever hinted to me by Lady Carbery) was that Lord Massey might probably be under some cloud of pecuniary embarrassments, such as suggested prudentially an absence from Ireland. Meantime, what was it that made him an object of peculiar interest to Lady Carbery? It was the singular revolution which in one whom all his friends looked upon as sold to constitutional torpor, suddenly and beyond all hope, had kindled a new and nobler life. Occupied originally by no shadow of any earthly interest, killed by ennui, all at once Lord Massey had fallen passionately in love with a fair young country woman, well connected, but bringing him no fortune (I report only from hearsay), and endowing him simply with the priceless blessing of her own womanly charms, her delightful society, and her sweet Irish style of innocent gaiety. No transformation, that ever legends or romances had reported, was more memorable. Lapse of time (for Lord Massey had now been married three or four years),2 and deep seclusion from general society, had done nothing apparently to lower the tone of his happiness. The expression of this happiness was noiseless and unobtrusive; no marks were there of vulgar uxoriousness-nothing that could provoke the sneer of the worldling; but not the less so entirely had the society of his young wife created a new principle of life within him, and evoked some nature hitherto slumbering, and which, no doubt, would else have continued

1 Hugh Massey, 3d Baron Massey in the Irish peerage, born 1761, had succeeded his father in the barony in 1790, and had married, 2d March 1792, Margaret, youngest daughter of William Barton, Esq. of Grove, Co. Tipperary.-M.

2 Eight years.

See last note.- M.