In De Quincey the romantic element is even more strongly developed than in Lamb, not only in his critical work, but also in his erratic and imaginative life.  He was profoundly educated, even more so than Coleridge, and was one of the keenest intellects of the age; yet his wonderful intellect seems always subordinate to his passion for dreaming.  Like Lamb, he was a friend and associate of the Lake poets, making his headquarters in Wordsworth’s old cottage at Grasmere for nearly twenty years.  Here the resemblance ceases, and a marked contrast begins.  As a man, Lamb is the most human and lovable of all our essayists; while De Quincey is the most uncanny and incomprehensible.  Lamb’s modest works breathe the two essential qualities of sympathy and humor; the greater number of De Quincey’s essays, while possessing more or less of both these qualities, are characterized chiefly by their brilliant style.  Life, as seen through De Quincey’s eyes, is nebulous and chaotic, and there is a suspicion of the fabulous in all that he wrote.  Even in The Revolt of the Tartars the romantic element is uppermost, and in much of De Quincey’s prose the element of unreality is more noticeable than in Shelley’s poetry.  Of his subject-matter, his facts, ideas, and criticisms, we are generally suspicious; but of his style, sometimes stately and sometimes headlong, now gorgeous as an Oriental dream, now musical as Keats’s Endymion, and always, even in the most violent contrasts, showing a harmony between the idea and the expression such as no other English writer, with the possible exception of Newman, has ever rivaled,—­say what you will of the marvelous brilliancy of De Quincey’s style, you have still only half expressed the truth.  It is the style alone which makes these essays immortal.

LIFE.  De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785.  In neither his father, who was a prosperous merchant, nor his mother, who was a quiet, unsympathetic woman, do we see any suggestion of the son’s almost uncanny genius.  As a child he was given to dreams, more vivid and intense but less beautiful than those of the young Blake to whom he bears a strong resemblance.  In the grammar school at Bath he displayed astonishing ability, and acquired Greek and Latin with a rapidity that frightened his slow tutors.  At fifteen he not only read Greek, but spoke it fluently; and one of his astounded teachers remarked, “That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.”  From the grammar school at Manchester, whither he was sent in 1800, he soon ran away, finding the instruction far below his abilities, and the rough life absolutely intolerable to his sensitive nature.  An uncle, just home from India, interceded for the boy lest he be sent back to the school, which he hated; and with an allowance of a guinea a week he started a career of vagrancy, much like that of Goldsmith, living on the open hills, in the huts of shepherds and charcoal