I.

THE DE QUINCEYS.

THIS family, which split into three national divisions, -English, French, and American, was originally Norwegian; and in the year of our Christian era One Thousand spoke the most undeniable Norse. Throughout the eleventh century, the heads of this family held themselves in readiness to join any likely leader; and did join William the Norman.

This Norwegian family having assumed a territorial denomination from the district or village of Quincey, in the province now called Normandy, transplanted themselves to England; where, and subsequently by marriage in Scotland, they ascended to the highest rank in both kingdoms, and held the highest offices open to a subject. Early in the seventh century, when it seemed likely that the interests of a particular family would be entangled with the principles at issue, multitudes became anxious to evade the strife by retiring to the asylum of forests. Amongst these was one branch of the De Quinceys.

Enamored of Democracy, this family, laying aside the aristocratic De attached to their name, settled in New-England where they subsequently rose, through long public services, to the highest moral rank-as measured by all possible expressions of public esteem that are consistent with the simplicities of the great

republic. Mr. Josiah Quincy, as head of this distinguished family, is appealed to as one who takes rank by age and large political experience, with the founders of the American Union.

Another branch of the same family had, at a much earlier period, settled in France. Finally, the squires and squireens natually remained in England. The last of them who enjoyed any relics, whatever, of that ancient territorial domain, was an elder kinsman of my father. I never had the honor of seeing him; in fact, it was impossible that I should have such an honor, since he died during the American war, which war had closed, although it had not paid its bills, some time before my birth. He enacted the part of squireen, I have been told, creditably enough in a village belonging either to the county of Leicester, Nottingham, or Rutland. With his death, a new era commenced for this historical family, which now, (as if expressly to irritate its ambition) finds itself distributed amongst three mighty nations,- France, America, and England, and precisely those three that are usually regarded as the leaders of civilization.

II.

CHILDHOOD.

My father was a merchant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar, but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive; that is, he was a man engaged in foreign commerce, and no other; therefore, in wholesale commerce, and no other. He died at an early age, leaving to his family, then consisting of a wife and six children, an unburdened estate producing exactly sixteen hundred pounds a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date of my narrative, whilst he was still living, he had an income very much larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any man who is acquainted with commercial life as it exists in England, it will readily occur that in an opulent English family of that class - opulent though not emphatically rich in a mercantile estimate — the domestic economy is pretty sure to move upon a scale of liberality altogether unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations.

We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur-"Give me neither poverty nor riches". was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were to see models of good

manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Grateful also to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan simplicity of dietthat we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration—that I lived in a rustic solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent

church.

my

dream

The earliest incidents in my life, which left stings in my memory so as to be remembered at this day, were two, and both before I could have completed my second year; namely, first, a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason that it demonstrates ing tendencies to have been constitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum; and, secondly, the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses. This I mention as inexplicable: for such annual resurrections of plants and flowers affect us only as memorials, or suggestions of some higher change, and therefore in connection with the idea of death; yet of death I could, at that time, have had no experience whatever.

This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two eldest sisters eldest of three then living, and also elder than myself— were summoned to an early death. The first who died was Jane, about two years older than myself. She was three and a half, I one and a half, more or less, by some trifle that I do not recollect. But death was then scarcely intelligible to me, and I could not so properly be said to suffer sorrow as a sad perplexity.

So passed away from earth one of those three sisters that made up my nursery playmates; and so did my acquaintance (if such it could be called) commence with mortality. Yet, in fact I knew little more of mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but perhaps she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was sad for Jane's absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again crocuses and roses; why not

little Jane?

Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my infant heart. Not so the second. For thou, dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I fancy a tiara of light or a gleaming aureola in token of thy premature intellectual grandeur,-thou whose head, for its superb developments, was the astonishment of science, thou next, but after an interval of happy years, thou also wert summoned away from our nursery; and the night, which for me gathered upon that event, ran after my steps far into life; and perhaps at this