or about whom the world might be inquisitive. Of these our concern in the present volume, for chronological reasons, is with Wordsworth and his fellow-celebrities of the Lake district, whether those that were resident there when De Quincey first visited it in Coleridge's company in 1807, or those that were resident there from 1809 onwards, when De Quincey had become a Lakist too, and was domiciled permanently, as it seemed, close to Wordsworth at Grasmere. To Wordsworth himself,—always De Quincey's man of men, or at least poet of poets, of his generation,—there were devoted three articles in Tait's Magazine for January, February, and April 1839, entitled "Lake Reminiscences: No. I. William Wordsworth, No. II. William Wordsworth, No. III. William Wordsworth." These were followed in July of the same year by a No. IV, entitled "William Wordsworth and Robert Southey," and in August by a No. V, in which Coleridge came back for some notice, and which was therefore entitled "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge." For the minor celebrities of the Lakes, after these three dii majorum gentium, and for sketches of Lake scenery and society generally, there was a relapse into the older magazine title "Sketches of Life and Manners" etc.; and the seven additional articles required for these straggled through the numbers of Tait's Magazine from September 1839 to August 1840. Save that one of the articles so inventoried goes back beyond the Lake period of De Quincey's life altogether, and that the main set of the Coleridge articles treats Coleridge generally and apart from his Lakist connexion, one might designate them collectively by that title of LAKE REMINISCENCES which De Quincey did use for some of them. As it is, however, the title LITERARY AND LAKE REMINISCENCES seems, on the whole, the fittest. One question remains. Whence are we to take the text of these LITERARY AND LAKE REMINISCENCES left by De Quincey? For the largest number of the included articles there is no option. They were not reprinted by De Quincey in the Collective Edition of 1853-60, though he must have contemplated reprinting them some time; and the text of them must therefore be taken from the pages of Tait's Magazine, in which they originally appeared. But for a portion of the Reminiscences, and a very important portion, there is an option. De Quincey did reprint in his Collective Edition the whole of his special set of Coleridge Recollections, with the exception of the last article of the four, throwing all the reprinted articles into one block, after somewhat careful revision; and he reprinted also in the same way the whole set of the special articles on Wordsworth, without any omission. These main Coleridge and Wordsworth papers are therefore reproduced in our present volume from De Quincey's own revised text of them,-with the restoration, however, in the case of the Coleridge chapter, of that fourth of the magazine articles on Coleridge which De Quincey omitted. The omission was unnecessary; and, as the American Collective Edition contains the omitted article, the present edition is entitled to the same benefit. What, however, about the two minor papers of the Lake Reminiscences which appeared as Nos. IV and V in Tait's Magazine for July and August 1839, under the titles of "William Wordsworth and Robert Southey," and "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," respectively? These also De Quincey reprinted in his Collective Edition, after a fashion ; but it was after a fashion which greatly impaired their interest. He threw them, or rather parts of them, into one, under the single title "Robert Southey," omitting a great deal of what was liveliest and best in the original articles. This may have been caused merely by his hurry at the time, in consequence of the pressure of the printers for copy in any form; but possibly it had another cause. De Quincey's Reminiscences of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, on their first appearance in Tait's Magazine between 1834 and 1840, had provoked a good deal of resentment among those concerned. Coleridge was then dead; but Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth were still living; as was also Southey. Little wonder that the surviving relatives of Coleridge felt aggrieved by the extreme frankness of some of De Quincey's personal recollections of the dead sage, or that the Wordsworth and Southey families were annoyed and offended on similar grounds. Wordsworth, with his massive serenity, seems, indeed, to have tossed the matter aside easily enough; but not so Southey. Carlyle tells us that, when he first met Southey in London, Southey was full of the subject of De Quincey's delinquencies in publishing so many anecdotes of a confidential kind respecting Wordsworth, Coleridge, and himself, and spoke on the subject in terms which Carlyle, who had read the articles, thought needlessly angry and vehement. Something of all this may have been in De Quincey's mind when, in reproducing his Lake Reminiscences in 1853 for his Collective Edition, he came to the two Tait articles in which Southey had principally figured. Hence, perhaps, though Southey had died in 1843, De Quincey's large excisions from those articles, and his consolidation of them into one paper, pleasant enough in the main, but comparatively insipid. It was an editorial mistake on De Quincey's part, and must not bind us now. The articles in their original livelier and more extensive magazine form being irrevocable at any rate, and forming part and parcel of the American Collective Edition, we have acted accordingly. We revert in the present edition to the text of Tait's Magazine for the particular articles in question, and print them as they stood there, with their separate titles. Respecting the present volume as a whole, it will now be understood that, while a portion of its contents consists of matter derived from De Quincey's revised edition of 185360, considerably the larger proportion consists of recovered magazine articles that have been practically inaccessible hitherto to British readers. So composed, the volume is certainly one of the richest specimens that could be offered of De Quincey's general characteristics. There are ups and downs in it, portions inferior to others in literary merit, and occasional lapses into what may seem spiteful or in bad taste. All in all, however, it illustrates most variously and most amusingly the shrewdness of De Quincey's observations of men and things, the range and readiness of his erudition, the subtlety and originality of his speculative intellect, his faculty of poetic imagination, his power of mournful pathos on the one hand and the most whimsical humour on the other, and the marvellous versatility and flexibility of his style. D. M. |