or observe moderation.  His flow of conversation was then the delight of old acquaintance and admiring strangers, who came to hear the charmer and to receive the impression, which could never be lost, of the singular figure and countenance and the finely modulated voice, which were like nothing else in the world.  It was a strange thing to look upon the fragile form and features, which might be those of a dying man, and to hear such utterances as his—­now the strangest comments and insignificant incidents; now pregnant remarks on great subjects, and then malignant gossip, virulent and base, but delivered with an air and a voice of philosophical calmness and intellectual commentary such as caused the disgust of the listener to be largely qualified with amusement and surprise.  One good thing was, that nobody’s name and fame could be really injured by any thing DeQuincey could say.  There was such a grotesque air about the mode of his evil speaking, and it was so gratuitous and excessive, that the hearer could not help regarding it as a singular sort of intellectual exercise, or an effort in the speaker to observe, for once, something outside of himself, rather than as any token of actual feeling towards the ostensible object.

Let this strange commentator on individual character meet with more mercy and a wiser interpretation than he was himself capable of.  He was not made like other men; and he did not live, think, or feel like them.  A singular organization was singularly and fatally deranged in its action before it could show its best quality.  Marvelous analytical faculty he had; but it all oozed out in barren words.  Charming eloquence he had; but it degenerated into egotistical garrulity, rendered tempting by the gilding of his genius.  It is questionable whether, if he had never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable stand-point of philosophical investigation; but the actual effect of his intemperance was to aggravate to excess his introspective tendencies, and to remove him incessantly further from the needful discipline of true science.  His conditions of body and mind were abnormal, and his study of the one thing he knew any thing about—­the human mind—­was radically imperfect.  His powers, noble and charming as they might have been, were at once wasted and weakened through their own partial excess.  His moral nature relaxed and sank, as must always be the case where sensibility is stimulated and action paralyzed; and the man of genius who, forty years before his death, administered a moral warning to all England, and commanded the sympathy and admiration of a nation, lived on, to achieve nothing but the delivery of some confidences of questionable value and beauty, and to command from us nothing more than a compassionate sorrow that an intellect so subtle and an eloquence so charming in its pathos, its humor, its insight, and its music, should have left the world in no way the better for such gifts, unless by the warning afforded in “Confessions” first, and then, by example, against the curse which neutralized their influence and corrupted its source.—­HARRIET MARTINEAU.