says, intellectual guide, his sister Elizabeth, eight years old, dying of hydrocephalus, after manifesting an intellectual power which the forlorn brother recalled with admiration and wonder for life.  The impression was undoubtedly genuine; but it is impossible to read the “Autobiographical Sketch” in which the death and funeral of the child are described without perceiving that the writer referred back to the period he was describing with emotions and reflex sensations which arose in him and fell from the pen at the moment.  His father, meantime, was residing abroad, year after year, as a condition of his living at all; and he died of pulmonary consumption before Thomas was seven years old.  The elder brother, then twelve, was obviously too eccentric for home management, if not for all control; and, looking no further than these constitutional cases, we are warranted in concluding that the Opium-eater entered life under peculiar and unfavorable conditions.

He passed through a succession of schools, and was distinguished by his eminent knowledge of Greek.  At fifteen he was pointed out by his master (himself a ripe scholar) to a stranger in the remarkable words, “That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.”  And it was not only the Greek, we imagine, but the eloquence, too, was included in this praise.  In this, as in the subtlety of the analytical power (so strangely mistaken for entire intellectual supremacy in our day), De Quincey must have strongly resembled Coleridge.  Both were fine Grecians, charming discoursers, eminent opium-takers, magnificent dreamers and seers; large in their promises, and helpless in their failure of performance.  De Quincey set his heart upon going to college earlier than his guardians thought proper; and, on his being disappointed in this matter, he ran away from his tutor’s house, and was lost for several months, first in Wales and afterward in London.  He was then sixteen.  His whole life presents no more remarkable evidence of his constant absorption in introspection than the fact that, while tortured with hunger in the streets of London, for many weeks, and sleeping (or rather lying awake with cold and hunger) on the floor of an empty house, it never once occurred to him to earn money.  As a classical corrector of the press, and in other ways, he might no doubt have obtained employment; but it was not till afterward asked why he did not, that the idea ever entered his mind.  How he starved, how he would have died but for a glass of spiced wine in the middle of the night on some steps in Soho Square, the Opium-eater told all the world above thirty years since; and also of his entering college; of the love of wine generated by the comfort it had yielded in his days of starvation; and again, of the disorder of the functions of the stomach which naturally followed, and the resort to opium as a refuge from the pain.  It is to be feared that the description given in those