they wrought in their lifetime, we find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that, possibly, by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, he may have been robbed of an earldom,—­or even that, during a life which by some years overlapped the average allotment to humanity, and through which were daily accumulating the most splendid results in the very highest departments of philosophy and art, these accumulations nevertheless went on without any notable recognition from a court the most liberal in all Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these years, as formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtile meditations, and to Sir William Hamilton for his philosophic speculations.  The absence of such merely nominal titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in them little that is monumental, and the pretty tinsel, with which they gild monuments already based on substantial worth, is easily, and without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from the loving remembrances of human hearts.

But at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal conditions in the case of De Quincey,—­though, assuredly, there was never a man upon earth whom these conditions, considered as aerial hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and magnificence, would more consistently fit,—­we cannot thus easily set aside those other outward conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their presence or absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its earliest tendencies and impulses,—­in that season of immature preparation when the channels of habit are in the process of formation, and while yet a marvellous uncertainty hangs and broods over the beginnings of life, as over the infant rivulet yet dandled and tended by its mountain-nurses.  For, although there are certain elements which rigidly and by a foreseen certainty determine its course, as, for instance, an extraordinary vantage-height of source, securing for it the force and swiftness of a torrent,—­yet how shifting are the mountain-winds, chilling into frosty silence or quickening with Favonian warmth, and how shifting the flying clouds, which, whether marshalled in mimic tournament above it, or in the shock of a real conflict, forever sway its tender fountains!  Thus, even in inexperienced childhood, do the scales of the individual destiny begin, favorably or unfavorably, to determine their future preponderations, by reason of influences merely material, and before, indeed, any sovereignty save a corporeal one (in conjunction with heavenly powers) is at all recognized in life.  For, in this period, with which above all others we associate influences the most divine, “with trailing clouds of glory,” those influences which are purely material are the most efficiently operative.  Against the former, adult man, in whom reason is developed, may battle, though ignobly, and, for himself, ruinously; and against the latter oftentimes he must