HARVARD COLLEGE SEP 22 1916 LIBRARY Gift of William Farnsworth PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANY, EDINBURGH. TO THE READER. THE HE following brief extract from the life of De Quincey, in the "English Cyclopædia," edited by Charles Knight, may be appropriately placed here in connection with this volume :— "It was in the year 1807 that De Quincey first made the acquaintance of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey; and on quitting college in 1808 he took up his abode at the Lakes, and became one of the intellectual brotherhood there constituted by these men. Wilson was a resident at the Lakes about the same time. The difference between De Quincey and the Lakists was-that his element was exclusively Prose. Like Coleridge, but with peculiarities sufficient to distinguish him from that thinker, he philosophised, and analysed, and speculated in sympathy with the new literary movement of which the Lake party was a manifestation. He resided ten or eleven years at the Lakes; and during these ten or eleven years we are to suppose him vi increasing his knowledge of Greek, of German, and of Universal History and Literature. "In point of time De Quincey preceded Carlyle as a literary medium between Germany and this country; and some of his earliest literary efforts were translations from Lessing, Richter, and other German authors. "These literary efforts, begun while he was still a student at the Lakes, were continued with growing abundance after he left them in 1819." |