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XXXII.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

(BORN 1786—­DIED 1859.)

A LIFE OF WONDER AND WARNING.

The “English Opium-eater” himself told publicly, throughout a period of between thirty and forty years, whatever is known about him to any body; and in sketching the events of his life, the recorder has little more to do than to indicate facts which may be found fully expanded in Mr. De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium-eater” and “Autobiographic Sketches.”  The business which he, in fact, left for others to do is that which, in spite of obvious impossibility, he was incessantly endeavoring to do himself—­that of analyzing and forming a representation and judgment of his mind, and of his life as molded by his mind.  The most intense metaphysician of a time remarkable for the predominance of metaphysical modes of thought, he was as completely unaware, as smaller men of his mental habits, that in his perpetual self-study and analysis he was never approaching the truth, for the simple reason that he was not even within ken of the necessary point of view.  “I,” he says, “whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little.”  And the description was a true one, as far as it went.  And the completion of the description was one which he could never have himself arrived at.  It must, we think, be concluded of De Quincey that he was the most remarkable instance in his time of a more than abnormal, of an artificial, condition of body and mind—­a characterization which he must necessarily be the last man to conceive of.  To understand this, it is necessary to glance at the events of his life.  The briefest notice will suffice, as they are within the reach of all, as related in his own books.

Thomas De Quincey was the son of a merchant engaged in foreign commerce, and was born at Manchester in 1786.  He was one of eight children, of whom no more than six were ever living at once, and several of whom died in infancy.  The survivors were reared in a country home, the incidents of which, when of a kind to excite emotion, impressed themselves on this singular child’s memory from a very early age.  We have known only two instances, in a rather wide experience of life, of persons distinctly remembering so far back as a year and a half old.  This was De Quincey’s age when three deaths happened in the family, which he remembered, not by tradition, but by his own contemporary emotions.  A sister of three and a half died, and he was perplexed by her disappearance, and terrified by the household whisper that she had been ill-used just before her death by a servant.  A grandmother died about the same time, leaving little impression, because she had been little seen.  The other death was of a beloved kingfisher, by a doleful accident.  When the boy was five, he lost his playfellow and, as he