and the infinite repetition of the same objects.  His sleep was filled with dim, vast images; measureless cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an endless succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven, up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure.  “Then came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and light; tempest and human faces.”  Many of De Quincey’s papers were autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in these reminiscences.  In the interminable wanderings of his pen—­for which, perhaps, opium was responsible—­he appears to lose all trace of facts or of any continuous story.  Every actual experience of his life seems to have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted till the reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque shadows of them, executing wild dances on a screen.  An instance of this process is described by himself in his Vision of Sudden Death.  But his unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception displayed in his Biographical Sketches of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other contemporaries:  in his critical papers on Pope, Milton, Lessing, Homer and the Homeridae:  his essay on Style; and his Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature.  His curious scholarship is seen in his articles on the Toilet of a Hebrew Lady, and the Casuistry of Roman Meals; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.  Of his narrative pieces the most remarkable is his Revolt of the Tartars, describing the flight of a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from Russia to the Chinese frontier:  a great hegira or anabasis, which extended for four thousand miles over desert steppes infested with foes, occupied six months’ time, and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon the way.  The subject was suited to De Quincey’s imagination.  It was like one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides’s great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.

An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner, and with—­said Emerson—­“a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible.”  He inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where he died in 1864, in his ninetieth year.  Dickens, who knew him at Bath, in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as Lawrence Boythorn, in Bleak House, whose “combination of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness,” testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his Diary, was true to the life.  Landor is the most purely