burners, in the tents of gypsies, wherever fancy led him.  His fear of the Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without money or friends, his life was even more extraordinary than his gypsy wanderings.  The details of this vagrancy are best learned in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, where we meet not simply the facts of his life, but also the confusion of dreams and fancies in the midst of which he wandered like a man lost on the mountains, with storm clouds under his feet hiding the familiar earth.  After a year of vagrancy and starvation he was found by his family and allowed to go to Oxford, where his career was marked by the most brilliant and erratic scholarship.  When ready for a degree, in 1807, he passed his written tests successfully, but felt a sudden terror at the thought of the oral examination and disappeared from the university, never to return.

It was in Oxford that De Quincey began the use of opium; to relieve the pains of neuralgia, and the habit increased until he was an almost hopeless slave to the drug.  Only his extraordinary will power enabled him to break away from the habit, after some thirty years of misery.  Some peculiarity of his delicate constitution enabled De Quincey to take enormous quantities of opium, enough to kill several ordinary men; and it was largely opium, working upon a sensitive imagination, which produced his gorgeous dreams, broken by intervals of weakness and profound depression.  For twenty years he resided at Grasmere in the companionship of the Lake poets; and here, led by the loss of his small fortune, he began to write, with the idea of supporting his family.  In 1821 he published his first famous work, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and for nearly forty years afterwards he wrote industriously, contributing to various magazines an astonishing number of essays on a great variety of subjects.  Without thought of literary fame, he contributed these articles anonymously; but fortunately, in 1853, he began to collect his own works, and the last of fourteen volumes was published just after his death.

In 1830, led by his connection with Blackwood’s Magazine, to which he was the chief contributor, De Quincey removed with his family to Edinburgh, where his erratic genius and his singularly childlike ways produced enough amusing anecdotes to fill a volume.  He would take a room in some place unknown to his friends and family; would live in it for a few years, until he had filled it, even to the bath tub, with books and with his own chaotic manuscripts, allowing no one to enter or disturb his den; and then, when the place became too crowded, he would lock the door and go away and take another lodging, where he repeated the same extraordinary performance.  He died in Edinburgh in 1859.  Like Lamb, he was a small, boyish figure, gentle, and elaborately courteous.  Though excessively shy, and escaping as often as possible to solitude, he was nevertheless fond of society, and his wide knowledge and vivid imagination made his conversations almost as prized as those of his friend Coleridge.