his mother's house trying to get an interview with his sister, was caught by an easy stratagem. He was not, however, sent back to school, but remained at his mother's house till his guardians should decide what was to be done with him.

Soon followed the great adventure of his life, the most interesting part of his Confessions. Obtaining some money from his mother for a pedestrian tour in Wales, he tired of the mountain solitudes, and shaped his course to London, in hopes of being able to borrow two hundred pounds on his expectations. Here he went through hard experiences. His errand brought him under the vexatious extortions and delays of a money-lender. He was reduced to the brink of starvation. On one occasion, indeed, he might have perished but for the kindness of a companion in misfortune, the poor outcast Anne, whom in happier days he vainly sought to trace. Fortunately he was discovered and taken home again. He remained at home about a year; but being taunted by his uncle with wasting his time, he undertook to go to Oxford upon £100 of an annual allowance, and proceeded thither in the October of 1803.

The Autobiographic Sketches,' as republished, terminate with his sudden resolution to go to Oxford. In their original form, as contributions to 'Tait's Magazine,' three more papers undertake to describe his life at Oxford, but these consist mostly of rambling digressions on the idea of an English University, on the Greek orators, on Paley, and suchlike, and contain very little personal narrative. This much we may glean, that he lived a hermit kind of life, and did not conform in the least to the studies of the place. He "sequestered himself" so completely that (to quote his own expression), "for the first two years of my residence in Oxford, I compute that I did not utter one hundred words." He had but one conversation with his tutor. "It consisted of three sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine." In all senses he was justified in exclaiming, "Oxford, ancient mother! hoary with ancestral honours, time-honoured, and, haply it may be, time-shattered power, I owe thee nothing! Of thy vast riches I took not a shilling, though living among multitudes who owed to thee their daily bread." In the matter of study, he was a law to himself. He told his tutor in that notable conversation that he was reading Paley; but in point of fact he had been "reading and studying very closely the ‘Parmenides.'” As a schoolboy he had attained to an unusual mastery over the Greek language, "moving through all the obstacles and resistances of a Greek book with the same celerity and ease as through those of the French and Latin ". and he read Greek daily; "but any slight vanity which he might connect with a power so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so readily transmutes itself into a disproportionate

C

admiration of the author, in him was absolutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken of his entire sensibilities at this time by our own literature."

In his 'Recollections of Coleridge' he says, "From 1803 to 1808 I was a student at Oxford." This probably means that for those five years he remained formally on the books of Worcester College. How much of this time he spent in actual residence is not recorded, and in all likelihood cannot be ascertained. When we consider his self-determined habits of study, we see that it matters comparatively little to know where he lived. There is a tradition that he once submitted to the written part of the Final Examination, but abruptly left Oxford without offering himself for the oral part.

In the intervals of his residence at Oxford, he began to make occasional visits to London, and to get introductions to literary society. He had always been especially anxious to see Coleridge and Wordsworth. When he ran away from school, he would have gone to the Lake district, had he not scrupled to present himself in the character of a fugitive schoolboy. About Christmas 1804-5 he had gone to London with an introduction to Charles Lamb, his final object being to procure through Lamb an introduction to Coleridge. His wishes were not gratified till later than this. first saw Coleridge at Bristol in the autumn of 1807, and Wordsworth later in the same year, at the poet's cottage in the Vale of Grasmere.

He

In the winter of 1808-9 he took up his residence at the Lakes. Wordsworth had quitted his cottage in Grasmere for the larger house of Allan Bank, and De Quincey succeeded this illustrious tenant. He retained this cottage for seven-and-twenty years, and up to 1829 it was his principal place of residence. "From this era," he says, "through a period of about twenty years in succession, I may describe my domicile as being amongst the lakes and mountains of Westmoreland. It is true, I often made excursions to London, Bath, and its neighbourhood, or northwards to Edinburgh; and perhaps, on an average, passed one-fourth part of each year at a distance from this district; but here only it was that henceforwards I had a house and small establishment." A good many interesting particulars about the society of the Lakes, and his way of passing his time, are given in some papers that have not been republished (Tait's Magazine,' 1840).

From the time of his settling at the Lakes, a habit grew upon him which powerfully influenced his life. Some four years after he took up his residence at Grasmere, he became a confirmed and daily opium-eater. The rise and progress of this habit, the pleasures and the pains of the "pernicious drug," and the miseries of his struggle to leave it off, are related in his Opium Confessions. He had first tasted opium in 1804, as a cure for toothache. From

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that date up to 1812 he took opium as an occasional indulgence, "fixing beforehand how often, within a given time, and when, he would commit a debauch of opium." It was not till 1813 that opium became with him an article of daily diet; in that year he multiplied the laudanum drams to allay "an appalling irritation of the stomach." The large doses once begun, he could not break off. He went on from one degree of indulgence to another, till in 1816 he was taking as much as 8000 drops of laudanum per day. Probably in view of his approaching marriage, he succeeded in reducing his allowance to 1000 drops. He married towards the close of 1816. Up to the midlle of 1817 he "judges himself to have been a happy man ;" and he draws a beautiful picture of the interior of his cottage in a stormy winter night, with warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.' Again he seems to have lapsed into over-indulgence-to have succumbed to the "Circean spells" of opium. The next four years he spent in a kind of intellectual torpor, utterly incapable of sustained exertion. "But for misery and suffering," he says, "I might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could prevail on myself to write a letter. An answer of a few words to any that I received was the utmost that I could accomplish; and often that not until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on my writing-table." At length in 1821, with the increasing expenses of his household, his affairs became embarrassed, and he was called upon by the strongest inducements to shake off this dead weight upon his energies. He succeeded. Unable wholly to renounce the use of opium, he yet reduced the amount so far as to be capable of literary exertion.1

His first production was the 'Confessions of an English OpiumEater.' This appeared in the 'London Magazine' in the autumn of 1821, and was reprinted in a separate form in the following year.

From 1821 to 1825, though he still spent the greater part of his time at Grasmere, he was often in London, his lodgings being in York Street, Covent Garden. During that time he was a frequent contributor to the London Magazine.' He speaks of his "daily task of writing and producing something for the journals;" calls

1 The Opium Confessions, as they stand in the final edition, convey the impression, though not in specific words, that he had wholly renounced the use of opium, and he is usually accused of having pretended to a self-command that he never absolutely acquired. Had the appendix to the first edition of the Confessions been reprinted, he might have been spared this accusation. He there explains why, in the narrative as originally written in the London Magazine,' he wished to convey the impression that he hat wholly renounced the use of opium; and says that in suffering his readers to think of him as a reformed opium-eater, he left no impression but what he shared himself.

himself " one of the corps littéraire ;" and says that the follow ing 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 A performance of his in whimsical gibe at the other contributors. 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 transDe Quincey reviewed the pseudolation from Sir Walter Scott. translation 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 "such almighty' nonthe work in detail, he found it, as he says, All sense (to speak transatlantice)" that translating it was out of the question; and accordingly he rewrote the greater part of it. the same, his composition was given to the English worl as a His dedication of the performance translation from the German. to the German forger is a very fine piece of humour. His industry in London does not seem to have been sufficiently rewarded to In a letter to Professor relieve him from his embarrassments. 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 "Murder conmost famous of these 'Blackwood' papers weresidered 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).

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 up 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 sepa rately.