excellent. Founded by whom, I never heard: |ment in which I began to find a motive for but certainly, when used by a systematic directing my thoughts to this new subject, I reader, it showed itself to have been system- wanted not something to say that might have atically collected; it stretched pretty equably perplexed an antagonist, or (in default of through two centuries, viz. from about 1600 such a vicious associate) that might have to 1800, and might perhaps amount to 17,000 amused a friend, more especially a friend so volumes. Lord Massey was far from illiter- predisposed to a high estimate of myself as ate; and his interest in books was unaffected, Lady Carbery. Sometimes I did more than if limited, and too often interrupted by de- amuse her: I startled her, and I even starfective knowledge."-Vol. ii. pp. 11, 12. tled myself, with distinctions that to this hour strike me as profoundly just, and as undeniably novel."-Vol. ii. pp. 44-46.

it was.

strated, reasoned, argued with his mother | both moral and intellectual; and possibly a and guardians in vain. It was decided that distinguished man may have been sacrificed as his patrimony was small (£150 a-year), it to make a remarkable boy. Our only opporwould be desirable for him to try one of the tunity of judging of the maturity of this reexhibitions of Manchester Grammar-school; markable promise, is in the papers and essays and thither he went, with a reluctance, dis- which form this collection, which all betray a dain and abhorrence of his position which defective judgment, and more learning than may be imagined. An unlooked-for allevia- wisdom, though there are nowhere wanting tion of its miseries, however, occurred at passages of original thought and keen obserfirst. A strange course of events brought vation: but all spoilt by a self-consciousness Lady Carbery herself to Manchester for six so obtrusive that it leads him perpetually to months, and an arrangement was made that account in a foot-note for his choice of any he should spend every evening at her house. word or phrase which seems to him peculiarly While this lasted, he found life endurable; felicitous; and sometimes marked by a singubut on her departure he put into practice his lar obliquity as to what is a fit subject for the long-formed resolution, and ran away. Not pen, or worthy of a sensible man's considerathat this independent step was thus vulgarly tion. Take, for example, his paper on "The designated in the “Opium Eater," where it is Last Days of Kant," an infidel though a to be found narrated at full length, and with philosopher. Mr. De Quincey always proa great deal of impressive language; but so fesses himself a good Christian and good The miseries which followed upon Churchman; we wish to dispute neither. his flight, hunger approaching to starvation, Why, then, should he think it worth while to and which laid the seeds of that complaint lay before English readers the puerile details for which he had recourse to opium as an al- of this unbeliever's life ?-prefacing them leviation; the strange companionship he with this pompous exordium : formed in his sad rambles for weeks and months in London, moneyless, and almost houseless, are there related in a strain partly pathetic and partly arrogant, but which will not be forgotten by those who have ever read them, and which sound stranger still in contrast with the brilliant life which preceded it, and which was, in fact, its cause. Nothing could induce him to reveal his retreat to his guardians, lest he should be forced to return to the hated bondage of school; of which, however, it should be explained that he had nothing whatever to complain, except that it was school. At length-it is not explained how -his friends traced him. He went home to his mother, and after a short, and probably very uncomfortable stay, entered at Oxford; with which fact these sketches of personal history close.

The history of such a boyhood is both a literary curiosity and a lesson; as such we have given it at a length which may need some apology. The pleasures, the excitements, the experiences, the acquirements, the trials of a lifetime were all run through at seventeen. Can it be expected that after-life should be otherwise than a falling off in importance and effect from such a beginning? Had his powers been better husbanded, there might have been material for high excellence,

"I take for granted, that all people of education still acknowledge some interest in the personal history of Immanuel Kant, however little their taste, or their opportunities, may have brought them acquainted with the history of Kant's philosophical opinions. A must always be an object of liberal curiosity; great man, though in an unpopular path, to suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though he should happen not to regard Kant with interest, it would still be among the fictions of courtesy to presume that he did."—Vol. iii. p. 99.

We dare to profess, on the part of most of our readers, very little interest in Kant, but were it otherwise our interest would not extend to the miserable details,which are really all that Mr. De Quincey has gathered from the memorials of his servile German disciples: entertaining us-his English Christian readers

with the mode in which the old man wrapped himself up in his bed-clothes-his objection to garters, and expedients for dispensing with these articles-his impatience for his coffee, and his views on the subject of strong beer.

Another paper, which appeared years ago in "Blackwood," is open to the same charge. He calls it a "foam bubble of gaiety," and is evidently proud of it by this republication,

consequentia, the right of inference is good. All scissors were bad; ergo, some scissors were bad.”—Vol. iv. 9.

p.

Again, where this same heroine is sinking from weakness, and is restored by stimulants, we have the plain fact recorded with all this wit as an introduction :

and appended defence; which, by the way, characteristically branches off into the history of the great Radcliffe highway murder. The point lies in treating murder as a joke. It is a mock lecture on murder, as one of the fine arts, sympathizing of course with the murderer, and betraying a morbid fascination with the subject; with little more humor "What is wanted just now for Kate, supthan is found in the ghastly mirth of some of posing Kate herself to be wanted by this the comic songs of the last century, which world, is, that this world would be kind placed all their hopes of raising a laugh in enough to send her a little brandy before it is the straightforward relation of some fatal which I have known to take place in more too late. The simple truth was, and a truth casualty. In a postscript the author express- ladies than Kate, who died, or did not die, es his indignation at readers of a "saturnine according as they had, or had not, an adviser, and gloomy class, without any genial sympa- like myself, capable of giving an opinion equal thy whatever," who have resented this joke. to Captain Bunsby's on this point, viz. whether He justifies himself by a sally of Swift's, who the jewelly star of life had descended too far down the arch towards setting, for any chance on one occasion proposed turning to account the supernumerary infants of the three king-fire was still burning in secret, but needed of reascending by spontaneous effort. The doms, by cooking and eating them. Now perhaps to be rekindled by patent artificial first, Swift is not a safe man to follow; and breath. It lingered and might linger, but again, an idea may be so forcibly displaced apparently would never culminate again withfrom its ordinary aspect, that the horror of it out some stimulus from earthly vineyards."may be lost-never faced at all-in the novVol. iv. p. 57.-Miscellanies, chiefly narraelty. But if Swift had expanded his suggestion into full detail of the vast infanticide

necessary to carry out his proposal, and made us dwell upon all the inevitable processes, illustrating them by several individual cases -the joke would have failed, nor would there have been any lack of those reproaches, which he pleads were never showered " on this dignitary of the supreme Irish Church." Mr. De Quincey in one place calls hilarity vulgar, which shows how little real comprehension of it he possesses. He certainly is seldom lively with any grace, for where his gaiety is open to no other charge, it is forced and unnatural. Witness his narrative of the adventures of a "Spanish military nun," a true story the facts of which are absolutely smothered in pleasantry and lively allusion:

"She was a handy girl. She could turn her hand to anything. Was there ever a girl in this world but herself that cheated and snapped her fingers at that awful Inquisition, which brooded over the convents of Spain ? that did this without collusion from outside, trusting to nobody but herself, and what beside? to one needle, two skeins of thread, and a bad pair of scissors! For, that the scissors were bad, though Kate does not say so in her memoirs, I know by an à priori argument; viz. because all scissors were bad in the year 1607. Now, say all decent logicians, from a universal to a particular valet

tive.

To which is appended a very long note of facetious attack on temperance societies, Dr. Darwin, and doctors in general, who have let their patients die for want of brandy, with allusions to the Princess Charlotte, the unhappy end of her physician, and an anecdote told the author by Southey.

But leaving these general subjects, which have nothing personally to do with our author, except as he forcibly connects himself with them, we will return to the recollections,

which form the true interest of these volumes. Though the objects of these reminiscences have had more than their share of such notices from the world of writers, and have already supplied innumerable "recollections," yet every fresh narrative of personal intercourse with Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, will be entered upon with curiosity and interest. Mr. De Quincey's youthful enthusiasm for the first and last of this trio is creditable to his early discernment. He regards the publication of Wordsworth's" Lyrical Ballads," and Coleridge's "The Ancient Mariner," which came out in the same volume, when he was yet but thirteen or fourteen, as a great event in unfolding his own mind. These poems were to him a "ray of a new morning," a "revelation of untrodden worlds.” Subsequently, when an Oxford student, and

his own master, he made the most deter- his magnificent talk with what good talking mined resolutions to see Coleridge. He had should always result in. Lord Egremont's even the idea of following him to Malta on saying is quoted," He talks very much like this Quixotic errand; but fortunately that an angel, and does nothing at all." Howgreat thinker's timely return to England ever, Coleridge was not always content with enabled him to indulge this longing at a doing nothing; and Mr. De Quincey reports more reasonable cost of time and money. language towards his wife—an injured and Coleridge, however, could never stand the harmless woman—which no gentleman in the test of close personal contact with his ad- truest sense of the word could have used, mirer. Mr. De Quincey's first approach to especially in speaking of her to a common intercourse was distinguished by the detection acquaintance,—and Mr. De Quincey does not of a plagiarism. The detection of plagiarisms profess to be more. is one of our author's hobbies, as perhaps, it "Coleridge, besides, assured me that his is with all great miscellaneous readers: it is marriage was not his own deliberate act, but one mode of bringing their labors to bear was in a manner forced upon his sense of upon their generation. It fell out thus: honor by the scrupulous Southey, who insistColeridge chanced not to be in when this visited that he had gone too far in his attentions

and what he would have called desperately in love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man."-Vol. ii. p. 167.

And thus he excused himself for first slighting, and then deserting his wife. Bearing such traits as these in mind, we grow dead to the reports of his mighty eloquence, which was always ready to overflow upon the first comer. Mr. De Quincey having traced him

to Miss Fricker, for any honorable retreat. was made; but his host hospitably entertained On the other hand, a neutral spectator of the our young pilgrim; and, in the course of conparties protested to me, that, if ever in his versation, relieved his mind of certain mis-life he had seen a man under deep fascination, givings on the subject of the "revolting dogma of Pythagoras about beans," on which Coleridge had been theorizing in a manner to excite suspicion. Was his view original? Mr. De Quincey was obliged to witness against him; he knew chapter and verse in the German author who had first offered the solution. The subject is so attractive, that though on the threshold of the longed-for introduction, he detains his readers many to his actual place of sojourn, accosts him in pages with instances of this peculiar trait of the philosopher's mind. The occupation is not a dignified one; and, in most cases, the detecter of plagiarisms suffers more than his victim in the estimation of the reader. Not that it should be so; but, after all, no man's fame ever stood on what he borrows from an

other.

He would be the same man (except for the suspicion cast on his honesty) in everybody's estimation, if he had not taken the idea, or phrase, or even more voluminous theft, with which he is charged; and this conviction is so strong in the general mind, that men are loth to attribute the act to moral turpitude even where completely proved, but to some more innocent perversity of the memory or judgment; and in most cases the charge is hissed off. That it was thus even in Mr. De Quincey's case we gather from a certain soreness of tone. But Coleridge's morals of action stand on lower grounds than amount of convinced plagiarism can place him. So we learn from every report of him that ever reached us from any one qualified to judge, and who had opportunity of measuring

any

the street, and within five minutes we read,—

"That point being settled, Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, suddenly recovers its volume of waters and its mighty music, swept at once, as if returning to his eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, natural business, into a continuous strain of the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical that it was possible to conceive. What I mean by saying that his transitions were just,' is by way of contradistinction to that mode of conversation which courts variety through links of verbal connexhave heard the complaint, seemed to wander; ions. Coleridge, to many people, and often I and he seemed then to wander the most when, in fact, his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest-viz. when the compass and huge circuit, by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. Long before this coming and naturally enough supposed that he had round commenced, most people had lost him, lost himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not

see their relations to the dominant theme. Had the conversation been thrown upon paper, it might have been easy to trace the continuity of the links."

"I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar from his language." -Vol. ii. pp. 158-160.

After a hasty greeting from the poet, who had to pass on to receive other guests, our author gives his introduction to Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth, which we must abridge. He had entered the cottage parlor :

"From the exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation around it, and from the dark hue of the wainscoting, this window, though tolerably large, did not furnish a very powerful We need not dwell, however, upon this However, I saw sufficiently to be aware of two light to one who entered from the open air. lengthened sketch. Since it was written, fuller ladies just entering the room through a doormemorials have appeared, putting the reader way opening upon a little staircase. The forein possession of more facts. The same may most, a tallish young woman, with the most winbe said of Wordsworth, and yet there are des- ning expression of benignity upon her features, criptions of him in his domestic aspect which advanced to me, presenting her hand with so are still well worth reading, and the picture have fled in a moment, before the native frank an air, that all embarrassment must of his sister conveys, we believe, a fuller idea goodness of her manner. This was Mrs. of that very interesting woman than can be Wordsworth, cousin of the poet; and, for the acquired elsewhere. The paper upon Words- last. five years or more, his wife. She was now worth is prefaced by a mention of the author's mother of two children, a son and a daughter; singular boyish awe and veneration of this and she furnished a remarkable proof how great poet: a sensation formed entirely on his possible it is for a woman neither handsome own estimate of his poetry, and so overpower-criticism-nay, generally pronounced very nor even comely, according to the rigor of ing that having, while a young man, actually plain-to exercise all the practical fascination travelled to Westmoreland for the purpose of of beauty, through the mere compensatory being introduced to him, (not without the en- charms of sweetness all but angelic, of simcouragement of an expressed wish on Words- plicity the most entire, womanly self-respect worth's part some time previously,) he actu- and purity of heart speaking through all her ally lost courage on coming in sight of the looks, acts, and movements. Words, I was poet's white cottage, and turned back again. In reality, she talked so little, that Mr. Slavegoing to have added; but her words were few. His actual introduction took place some years Trade Clarkson used to allege against her, later, on occasion of his escorting Mrs. Cole- that she could only say "God bless you!" ridge and her children to Keswick, taking Certainly, her intellect was not of an active Grasmere by the way. His welcome, then, order; but, in a quiescent, reposing, meditawas a kind and cordial one, and the whole tive way, she appeared always to have a genial scene was in harmony with his raised expec- enjoyment from her own thoughts." tations. Indeed, in all the reports of Wordsworth, though there may be mortifying hints or more express notices of petty foibles to mar the completeness of the picture, yet he does, as a whole, present a picture of what a poet, and a poet's life, ought to be, such as cannot be matched elsewhere. And to this completeness the ladies of his family mainly contribute; admirable accessories they are, gentle, serene satellites: content to set him forth as

the central object; to be known only through him; to make their whole being minister to him. This office we are accustomed to think natural in a wife, but the sister's added devotion is a peculiar feature in this model home. Nor can it be guessed to what extent her influence may have told on the development and harmonizing of his highest intellectual gifts.

something peculiarly pleasing even in this "In complexion she was fair, and there was accident of the skin, for it was accompanied by an animated expression of health, a blessing which, in fact, she possessed uninterruptedly. Her eyes, the reader may already know, were

'Like stars of twilight fair;

Like twilight, too, her dark brown hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn.' Yet strange it is to tell that, in these eyes of vesper gentleness, there was a considerable obliquity of vision; and much beyond that slight obliquity which is often supposed to be an attractive foible in the countenance: this ought to have been displeasing or repulsive; had they been ten times more and greater, yet, in fact, it was not. Indeed, all faults, would have been neutralized by that supreme expression of her features, to the unity of