struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck.  But the child, helpless alike for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields him from all conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though, because impotent and unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to material circumstance,—­a slavery which he cannot escape, and which, during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his very blood, bone, and nerve.  To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child succumbs; on the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often weans the adult, wraps childhood about with a sheltering care; and fortunate indeed it is, if the mastery of Nature over us during our first years is thus a gentle dealing with us, fertilizing our powers with the rich juices of an earthly prosperity.  And in this respect De Quincey was eminently fortunate.  The powers of heaven and of earth and—­if we side with Milton and other pagan mythologists in attributing the gift of wealth to some Plutonian dynasty—­the dark powers under the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in his behalf.  Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his name they postponed till a far-off future, in the mean time granting him the happiest of all childhoods.  Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining whatever substantial benefits in constitutional temperament and susceptibilities could be thence derived, although lacking, as Pope also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy heralding of this distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely against the assault, in any form, of pinching poverty, (as would be any one in tolerably comfortable circumstances,) but even against the most trivial hint of possible want,—­against all necessity of limitation or retrenchment in any normal line of expenditure.

He was the son of a merchant, who, at the early age of thirty-nine, died, leaving to his family—­a wife and six children—­an estate yielding annually an income of sixteen hundred pounds.  And as at his father’s death De Quincey was seven years old, we may reasonably infer, that, during this previous period, while his father was still living, and adding to this fixed a fluctuating income from his yearly gains, (which to a wholesale merchant of his standing were considerable,) the family-fortunes were even more auspicious, amounting to the yearly realization of between two and three thousand pounds, and that at a time when Napoleon had not as yet meddled with the financial affairs of Europe, nor by his intimidations caused even pounds and shillings to shrink into less worth and significance than they formerly had,—­in view of which fact, if we are to charge Alexander the Great (as in a famous anecdote he was charged) with the crime of highway-robbery, as the “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” in the way of crowns and a few dozen sceptres, what a heinous charge must