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

ance.

We have several descriptions of De Quincey's personal appearHe 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, The lines of his countenance which was also slightly contracted. fell naturally into an expression of mild suffering, of endurance sweetened by benevolence, or, according to the fancy of the interAll that met him seem preter, of gentle, melancholy sweetness. 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 "A more worthless body than his own, exaggerates his infirmity. It is his pride to believe the author is free to confess, cannot be. 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, 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.

a man has reason to think himself well off 1 "In general," says our author, “ 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."

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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 1 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. 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,

He

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ranging through many varieties of grave and gay. He applied this transfiguring process to the incidents of his own life- not inventing romantic or comical incidents, but dwelling upon certain features of what really took place, and investing them with lofty, tender, or humorous imagery. So with his friends and casual acquaintances. He was sufficiently observant of what they really did and said, was remarkably acute in divining what passed in their minds, and felt the disagreeable as well as the agreeable points of their character; but he had the power of abstracting from the disagreeable circumstances. He fixed his imagination upon the agreeable side of an acquaintance, and transmuted the mixed handiwork of nature into a pure object of æsthetic pleasure. His pleasures, we have said, were not boisterous. He had not the constitution for hearty enjoyment of life. In his Sketches he describes himself as being, in his boyhood, "the shiest of children," constitutionally touched with pensiveness," "naturally dedicated to despondency." From his repose of manners he was a privileged visitor to the bedroom of his dying father. was passionately fond of peace, had "a perfect craze for being despised "-considering contempt as the only security for unmolested repose- and always tried to hide his precocious accomplishments from the curiosity of strangers. All his life through he retained this shyness. He had splendid conversational powers, and never was silent from timidity, at least when under the influence of his favourite opium; and yet he rather avoided than courted society. He humorously tells us how he was horrified at a party in London when he saw a large company of guests filing in one after the other, and divined from their looks that they had come to "lionise" the Opium-Eater. Mr Hill Burton represents the difficulty of getting him out to literary parties in Edinburgh in spite of his most solemn promises; and we have from Professor Masson a pleasant instance of his shyness to recognise a new acquaintance in the street, and of his nervousness when he found himself the subject of observation.

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In

Such a man often contracts strong special attachments. some of the impassioned records of the Confessions and the Autobiographic Sketches,' we have evidence of the strength of De Quincey's affections. In writing of living friends, he usually practises a delicate reserve, and veils his tenderness under the mask of humour. Yet even to this there are some exceptions, such as the touching address to his absent wife in the Opium Confessions. In writing of departed friends, he pours out his feelings without reserve. His sister Elizabeth, the outcast Anne,

1 It is not meant that he was so unlike other men as to be doing this constantly; only that he seized upon and transfigured actual objects into ideals much more than the generality of intellectual men.

the infant daughter of Wordsworth, and his unfortunate friend Charles Lloyd, may be mentioned as objects that at different periods of his life engrossed his affections, and whose loss he deplores with impassioned sorrow.

He has sometimes been accused of letting his imagination dwell too favourably upon himself-of being especially vain. Now we call a man vain when he pretends to something that he does not possess, or when he makes an ostentatious display of his possessions. It has not been alleged that De Quincey was vain in the first and worst sense; he has never been accused of exaggerating for the purpose of extorting admiration. But it is alleged that he was vain in the second sense; that he makes a complacently ostentatious display of his ancestral line, of his aristocratic connections, of his romantic adventures, of his philosophical knowledge, of his wonderful dreams. Such a charge could hardly be made but by a hasty or an undiscriminating reader. In the Autobiographic Sketches' we are never complacently invited to admire. We never think of the writer as a self-glorified hero, unless we are all the more jealous of being thrown into the shade. We are taken into his confidence, but he challenges our sympathy, not our admiration. He often speaks of himself humorously, but never with ostentatious complacency. He treats himself with no greater favour than any of the other subjects of his narrative. The truth seems to be, that he who observed and speculated upon every human creature that came under his notice, observed and speculated most of all upon himself as the human creature that he was best acquainted with. He was too discerning a genius to be unconscious of his own excellence, and too little of a humbug to pretend that he was.

It

As he has been accused of vanity, so he has sometimes been accused of arrogance, upon a still graver misconception of his shy, retiring nature, and his humorous self-irony. His dogmatic judgments of Plato, Cicero, Dr Johnson, and other eminent men, and his strong expressions of national and political prejudice, are sometimes quoted as signs of a tendency to domineer. may safely be asserted that whoever takes up this view has not penetrated far into the peculiar personality of De Quincey. Whatever might be the strength of his expressions, and these were often exaggerated for comic effect, there have been few men of equal power more unaffectedly open to reasonable conviction. When he had made up his mind, he took a pleasure, usually a humorous pleasure, in putting his opinion as strongly as possible; but that was no index as regarded his susceptibility to new light. This we may reasonably infer from his character as revealed in his works; and if we need further evidence, we have it in the words 1 The two last are mentioned in papers that have not been reprinted