DE PTJY. 143 DE QtriNCEY. DE PITY, dc pu, William Harrison (1S21- inOl). An American Jlothodist Kpit^copal clergy- man. He was born at Penn Yan. X. Y., and was educated at (ienesee College, Union Inivorsity, and Mount Union College. In 1S6G he was ap- pointed editor of tlie Mcllwdist Year Book and conducted tl'iat publication until 1889. He was also for many years co-editor of the pub- lication known as the .Ycif Yorh Christian Ad- locate. His publications include: Comijciidiidn of i'scful Infoniuition (1S78): The People's Cyclodadia of Universal Knowlcdye (1882); The People's Atlas (188li) ; American lierisions and Additions to I-Jnci/cloptrdia Brilanni^a (ISitl) ; Cniversity of Literature (1896). Several of these works have had wide circulation. DE QTJIN'CEY, Thomas (178.5-1859). A great English prose writer. He was born in Jlan- chestcr, where his father had been a successful merchant in the foreign trade, and left at his death an estate producing about £1000 a year. The future essayist as a child was retiring and sensitive, alien from the actualities of life; and even before his opium-eating had begun, his natu- ral tendency was to live in a dream-world of his own creation. Y'et in some directions he made remarkable progress in his studies at the gram- mar schools of Bath and Manchester, especially in Greek. "That boy." said one of his teachers, "could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." He ran away from the Manchester school, and had a brief ad- venturous career among the Welsh hills and in London, where he remained a year and nearly starved before he was discovered by his family and sent to Worcester College, Oxford. Here he S])ent five years, though he left the university without a degree. During this period, in 180-1, he resorted for the first time to opium as a cure for severe rheumatic pains in the head: and the habit grew upon him as rapidly and to almost as disastrous an extent as it did upon Coleridge, gaining a hold upon him which he was never able entirely to shake off, though by 1821 he had suc- ceeded in reducing the quantity sufficiently to allow regular and sustained work. In 1808 he took up his residence on the borders of Grasmere, attracted thither by his affectionate veneration for Wordsworth and Coleridge. Here he enjoyed their society and that of Southey and 'Christo- pher Xorth', read widely in classical, German, anil English literature, and began to produce his own magnificent contributions to the lat- ter. The events of his later years are not very diversified or striking, and it is difficult to trace them accurately from his own autobiographical remains, which have at times the vagueness and inconsequence of his opium dreams. In 1810 he married, and during the rest of his life supported himself and his family almost entirely by his pen, though often enlbarrassed by the money difficul- ties which seem inseparable from a certain type of literary genius, .fter several years spent in London, his connection with lilarl; wood's Mafja- sine drew him to Edinburgh, in or near which he spent the rest of his life, finding a grave there in the West Churchyard. Nearly all his work appeared first in periodi- cals — TilnchiFood's. Tail's, and the London Maga- sine : but its remarkable qualities led to its pres- rr-ation from the fate of merely ephemeral literature. His first gi-eat success was the f'on- fessions of an English Opium-Eater, which ap- peared in the London Mayazinc in 1821, and at- tracted universal attention. Only a small part of it is devoted to the results of the drug, the rest being a fascinating, if discursive, sketch of the scenes and surroundings of his life up to that time. It was ultimately sujiplcmented by the darker Suspiria de Profundis (1845), made up of the marvelous and terrible imaginings inspired by opium. His grim humor is well represented by Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827), and the penetration of his imaginative criticism by his essay On the Knocl;in(i at the Gate in Macbeth (1823). Special mention may also be made of his Letters to a Young Man (1823), and of his essays on Style and Rhetoric (1840) ; on Joan of Arc (1847), and The English Mail Coach (1849). A series of about thirty articles, collected in 1853 under the title of Auto- biographic liketchcs, is also of great interest. In criticism. De Quincey must be regarded very highly: his view of things might be called essen- tially analytical. His Literary Reminiscences embraces broad views of Lamb, Coleridge, Words- worth, Southey, and others, and there are also studies of Shelley, Keats, Goldsmith. Pojie, God- win, Hazlitt, Landor. etc. It is ditiieult to find critical matter so luminous and scientific, and the style, at its best incomparable, is as brilliant as the judgments are just. His great importance to literature lies in the new possibilities which he revealed in English prose. He has himself in the Confessions associ- ated together the names of the seventeenth-cen- tury authors who come nearest to being his models in style: "Donne, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taj-lor, Milton, South, Barrow form a plciad of seven golden stars such as no literature can match in their own class." But the claim involved in his designation of the Cotifessions and Suspiria as "modes of impas- sioned prose ranging under no precedents that T am aware of in any literature," may be justified by the fact that the gorgeous, colorful, and rhyth- mical prose in which De Quincey equaled or sur- passed his predecessors was in his hands a deliber- ate and formal style, whose "purple patches' are seldom out of place, and whose majestic and soul-stirring harmonies can be paralleled only among musical instruments by the rich fullness of a great organ. Euskin is his most conspicuous successor in this style; but it had a wide influence throughout the remainder of the century. His writing is far from faultless: it has two consid- erable defects — a tendency to lapse, in the midst of a lofty strain, into pointless triviality, and a discursiveness which renders it impossible for him to go straight along the high road of his main thought without darting off to right and left to explore little green lanes of whimsical fancy or erudite allusion. He will never, perhaps, be -x popular writer. He postulates in tlie reader who is to enjoy him fully too similar an equipment in culture, in imagination, in wide knowledge of books and men ; but for that very reason be must remain all the more valued by those who are able to appreciate him — an intellectual luxury and stimulus alike. According to his own famous dis- tinction between the "literature of knowledge' and the 'literature of power.' it is to the latter class that his own work belongs; and of it may bo predicated his general conclusion that such litera- ture will remain "triumphant forever, as long as the langiage exists in which it speaks."
