disagreed with him; the hard he could not eat.  Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of that vegetable unguent to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it might be supposed that there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to be treated in the house that night.  How many drops?  Drops! nonsense!  If the wineglasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal size, there was no risk,—­and so the weary is at rest for a time.

“At early morn, a triumphant cry of ‘Eureka!’ calls me to his place of rest.  With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books, and lugged a considerable heap of them around him.  That one which specially claims his attention—­my best-bound quarto—­is spread upon a piece of bedroom-furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry.  He had discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very important period.  As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face from the book with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it occurred to me that I had seen something like the scene in Dutch paintings of the Temptation of St. Anthony.”

I cannot refrain from quoting from Mr. Burton one more example, illustrative of the fact that De Quincey, in money-matters, considered merely the immediate and pressing exigencies of the present.  “He arrives very late at a friend’s door, and on gaining admission,—­a process in which he often endured impediments,—­he represents, with his usual silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his being then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the realm,—­the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence.  Discovering, or fancying he discovers, that his eloquence is likely to prove unproductive, he is fortunately reminded, that, should there be any difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he is at that moment in possession of a document which he is prepared to deposit with the lender,—­a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to remove any feeling of anxiety which the moat prudent person could experience in the circumstances.  After a rummage in his pockets, which develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable, possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled bit of paper, and spread it out,—­a fifty-pound bank-note!  All sums of money were measured by him through the common standard of immediate use; and, with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note, might he inform you, that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be the nearest to him at the time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded in negotiating a loan of two-pence.”