on the 15th of August 1785. He was the fifth child in a family of eight (four sons and four daughters), of whom three died young. His father, descended from a Nor man family, was an opulent merchant, who lived much abroad, partly to look after his foreign engagements, but mainly from considerations of health ; he died of pulmonary consumption in the thirty-ninth year of his age, leaving his wife and six children a clear income of £1600 a year. The widow, a woman of exceptional talent, secured to her family the enjoyment of those social and educational advantages which their position and means afforded. Thomas was from infancy a shy, sensitive child, with a constitutional tendency to dreaming by night and by day; and, under the influence of an elder brother, a lad " whose genius for mischief amounted to inspiration," who died in his sixteenth year, he spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of their own creating. The amusements and occupations of the whole family, indeed, seem to have been mainly intellectual ; and in De Quincey s case, emphatically, " the child was father to the man." " My life has been," he affirms in the Confessions, "on the whole the life of a philosopher ; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been." From boyhood he was more or less in contact with a polished circle ; his education, easy to one of such native aptitude, was sedu lously attended to. When he was in his twelfth year the family removed to Bath, where he was sent to the grammar school, at which he remained for about two years ; and for a year more he attended another public school at Winkfield, Wiltshire. At both his proficiency was the marvel of his masters. At thirteen he wrote Greek with ease ; at fifteen he not only composed Greek verses in lyric measures, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrass ment ; one of his masters said of him, " that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." Towards the close of his fifteenth year he visited Ireland, with a companion of his own age, Lord Westport, the son of Lord Altamont, an Irish peer, and spent there in residence and travel some months of the summer and autumn of the year 1800, being a spectator at Dublin of " the final ratification of the bill which united Ireland to Great Britain." On his return to England, his mother having now settled at St John s Priory, a residence near Chester, De Quincey was sent to the Manchester grammar school, mainly that it might be easier for him to got thence to Oxford through his obtaining one of the school exhibitions.
Discontented with the mode in which his guardians con ducted his education, and with some view apparently of forcing them to send him earlier to college, he left this school after less than a year s residence ran away, in short, to his mother s house. There one of his guardians made an arrangement for him to have a weekly allowance, on which he might reside at some country place in Wales, and pursue his studies, presumably till he could go to college. From Wales, however, after brief trial, " suffer ing grievously from want of books," he went off as he had done from school, and hid himself from guardians and friends in the world of London. And now, as he says, commenced " that episode, or impassioned parenthesis of my life, which is comprehended in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater." This London episode extended over a year or more ; at the end of it the lad was recon ciled to his guardians, and in 1803 went to Oxford, being by this time about nineteen. It was in the coarse of his second year at Oxford that he first tasted opium, having taken it to allay neuralgic pains.
After finishing his career of five years at college in 1808, he ultimately settled in 1812 to the life of a student on the borders of Grasmere, drawn thither partly by neigh bourhood to Wordsworth, whom he early appreciated, having been, he says, the only man in all Europe who quoted Wordsworth so early as 1802. Here also ho enjoyed the society and friendship of Coleridge, Wilson, and Southey, as in London he had of Charles Lamb and his select circle. Here he continued his classical and other studies, especially exploring the at that time almost unknown region of Gorman literature, and indicating its riches to English readers. Here also, in 181G, he married the " dear M ," of whom a charming glimpse is ac corded to the reader of the Confessions ; his family came to be five sons and three daughters. For a year he edited, at Kendal, the Westmoreland Gazette. He resided till the end of 1320 at Grasmere, afterwards in London, and latterly at Lasswade near Edinburgh, or in Edinburgh. He died in that city December 8, 1859, aged seventy-four, and is buried in the West Churchyard.
During nearly fifty years De Quincey lived mainly by his pen. His patrimony seems never to have been en tirely exhausted, and his habits and tastes were simple and inexpensive ; but he was careless to recklessness in the use of money, and debts and pecuniary difficulties of all sorts hung about him through the greater part of his life. There was, indeed, his associates affirm, an element of romance even in his impecuniosity, as there was in every thing about him ; and the diplomatic and other devices by which he contrived to keep clear of clamant creditors, svhile scrupulously fulfilling many obligations, often dis armed animosity, and converted annoyance into amuse ment. The famous Confessions of an English Opium Eater, having first appeared in The London Magazine, were pub lished in a small volume in 1820, and attracted a very remarkable degree of attention, not simply from their dis closures as to his excessive use of the drug, and its effects, but also by the marvellous beauty of the style of the work, its romantic episodes, and extraordinary power of dream- painting. All De Quincey s other writings appeared in periodicals Blackwood s Magazine, Tait s Magazine, Hogg s Instructor, &c. No other literary man of his time, it has been remarked, achieved so high and universal a reputation from such merely fugitive efforts. Since his works were brought together, that reputation has been not merely maintained, but extended. The American edition of twelve volumes was reprinted in this country in 1853, under the author s own supervision, and expanded to fourteen volumes ; upon his death two more volumes were made up of previously uncollected material. For range of thought and topic, within the limits of pure literature, no like amount of material of such equality of merit has proceeded from any eminent writer of our day. However profuse and discursive, De Quincey is always polished, and generally exact a scholar, a wit, a man of the world, and a philosopher, as well as a genius. He looked upon letters as a noble and responsible calling; in his essay on Oliver Goldsmith he claims for literature the rank not only of a fine art, but of the highest and most potent of fine arts ; and as such he himself regarded and practised it. He drew a broad distinction between " the literature of knowledge and the literature of power" asserting that the function of the first is to teach, the function of the second to move, maintaining that the meanest of authors who moves has pre-eminence over all who merely teach, that the literature of knowledge must perish by supersession, while the literature of power is " triumphant for ever as long as the language exists in which it speaks." It is to this class of motive literature that De Quincey s own works essentially belong; it is by virtue of that vital element of power that they have emerged from the rapid oblivion of periodical ism, and live in the minds of a second generation
