DEPUTY, one appointed to act or govern instead of another ; one who exercises an office in another man's right, a substitute ; in representative government a member of an elected chamber. Various officials are empowered by statute to appoint deputies. Thus, a clerk of the peace, in case of illness, incapacity or absence, may appoint a fit person to act as his deputy. While judges of the supreme court cannot act by deputy, county court judges and recorders can, in cases of illness or unavoidable absence, appoint deputies. So can registrars of county courts and returning officers at elections. In many countries, e.g., France and Spain, members of the lower house of parliament are called deputies.
DE QUINCEY, THOMAS' was born at Greenheys, Manchester, the fifth child in a family of eight (four sons and four daughters) . His father left his wife and six children a clear income of f 1,60o a year. Thomas was from infancy a shy, sensitive child, with a constitutional tendency to dreaming by night and by day; and, under the in fluence of an elder brother, a lad "whose genius for mischief amounted to inspirations," who died in his r 6th year, he spent much of his boyhood in imaginary worlds of their own creating. The amusements and occupations of the whole family, indeed, seem to have been mainly intellectual; and in De Quincey's case, emphatically, "the child was father to the man." "My life has been," he affirms in the Confessions, "on the whole the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been." He received a rather desultory education, though at 15 he could speak Greek fluently. He ran away from his last school, Manchester Grammar school, and was sent into the country in Wales. Then he again ran away, this time to London, where, he says, commenced "that episode, or impas sioned parenthesis of my life, which is comprehended in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater." This London episode extended over a year or more ; his money soon vanished, and he was in the utmost poverty; he obtained shelter for the night in Greek street, Soho, from a moneylender's agent, and spent his days wandering in the streets and parks ; finally the lad was reconciled to his guardians, and in 1803 was sent to Worcester college, Oxford, being by this time about 1 g. It was in the course of his second year at Oxford that he first tasted opium—having taken it to allay neuralgic pains. De Quincey's mother had settled at Weston Lea, near Bath, and on one of his visits to Bath, De Quincey made the acquaintance of Coleridge ; he took Mrs. Coleridge to Grasmere, where he became personally acquainted with Wordsworth.
After finishing his career of five years at college in 18o8 he kept terms at the Middle Temple; but in 18og visited the Words worths at Grasmere, and in the autumn returned to Dove cot tage, which he had taken on a lease. His choice was of course influenced partly by neighbourhood to Wordsworth, whom he early appreciated, having been, he says, the only man in all Europe who quoted Wordsworth so early as 1802. His friendship with 'The following account has been abbreviated for this ed. Its original author, John Ritchie Findlay (1824-1898), proprietor of The Scotsman newspaper, and the donor of the Scottish National Portrait gallery in Edinburgh, had been intimate with De Quincey, and in 1886 published his Personal Recollections of him.
Wordsworth decreased within a few years, and when in De Quincey published in Tait's Magazine his reminiscences of the Grasmere circle, the indiscreet references to the Wordsworths contained in the article led to a complete cessation of intercourse. Here also he enjoyed the society and friendship of Coleridge, Southey, and especially of Prof. Wilson, as in London he had of Charles Lamb and his circle. He continued his classical and other studies, especially exploring the, at that time, almost un known region of German literature, and indicating its riches to English readers. Here also, in 1816, he married Margaret Simp son, the "dear M " of whom a charming glimpse is accorded to the reader of the Confessions; his family came to be five sons and three daughters.
For about a year and a half he edited the Westmorland Gazette. He left Grasmere for London in the early part of 182o. The Lambs received him with great kindness and introduced him to the proprietors of the London Magazine. It was in this journal in 1821 that the Confessions appeared. De Quincey also con tributed to Blackwood, to Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and later to Tait's Magazine. His connection with Blackwood took him to Edinburgh in 1828, and he lived there for 12 years, contributing from time to time to the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. His wife died in 1837, and the family eventually settled at Lasswade, but from this time De Quincey spent his time in lodgings in various places, staying at one place until the accumulation of papers filled the rooms, when he left them in charge of the landlady and wandered elsewhere. After his wife's death he gave way for the fourth time in his life to the opium habit, but in 1844 he reduced his daily quantity by a tremendous effort to six grains, and never again yielded. He died in Edinburgh on Dec. 8, 1859, and is buried in the West Churchyard.
During nearly 5o years De Quincey lived mainly by his pen. His patrimony seems never to have been entirely exhausted, and his habits and tastes were simple and inexpensive; but he was reckless in the use of money, and had debts and pecuniary difficulties of all sorts. The famous Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in a small volume in 1822, and at tracted attention, not simply by its personal disclosures, but by the extraordinary power of its dream-painting. No other literary man of his time, it has been remarked, achieved so high and universal a reputation from such merely fugitive efforts. The only works published separately (not in periodicals) were a novel Klosterheim (1832), and The Logic of Political Economy (1844). After his works were brought together, De Quincey's reputation was not merely maintained, but extended. For range of thought and topic, within the limits of pure literature, no like amount of material of such equality of merit proceeded from any eminent writer of the day. However profuse and discursive, De Quincey is always polished, and generally exacta scholar, a wit, a man of the world and a philosopher, as well as a genius. He looked upon letters as a noble and responsible calling; in his essay on Oliver Goldsmith he claims for literature the rank not only of a fine art, but of the highest and most potent of fine arts; and as such he himself regarded and practised it. He drew a broad distinc tion between "the literature of knowledge and the literature of power," asserting that the function of the first is to teach, the function of the second to move—maintaining that the meanest of authors who moves has pre-eminence over all who merely teach, that the literature of knowledge must perish by superses sion, while the literature of power is "triumphant for ever as long as the language exists in which it speaks." It is to this class of motive literature that De Quincey's own works essentially belong; it is by virtue of that vital element of power that they have emerged from the rapid oblivion of periodicalism, and live in the minds of later generations. But their power is weakened by their volume.
De Quincey fully defined his own position and claim to distinc tion in the preface to his collected works. These he divides into three classes : "first, that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader," such as the Narratives, Autobiographic Sketches, etc.; second, "papers which address themselves purely to the under standing as an insulated faculty, or do so primarily," such as the essays on Essenism, the Caesars, Cicero, etc. ; and finally, as a third class, "and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class of compositions," he ranks those "modes of impassioned prose rang ing under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature," such as the Confessions and Suspiria de Pro f undis. The high claim here asserted has been questioned; and short and isolated examples of eloquent apostrophe, and highly wrought imaginative description, have been cited from Rousseau and other masters of style ; but De Quincey's power of sustaining a fascinating and elevated strain of "impassioned prose" is allowed to be entirely his own. Another obvious quality of all his genius is its overflow ing fullness of allusion and illustration, recalling his own descrip tion of a great philosopher or scholar—"Not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones into the unity of breathing life." In politics, in the party sense of that term, he would probably have been classed as a Liberal Conservative or Conservative Liberal—at one period of his life perhaps the former, and at a later the latter. As he advanced in years his views became more and more decidedly liberal, but he was always as far removed from Radicalism as from Toryism, and may be described as a philosophical politician, capable of classification under no definite party name or colour. Of political economy he had been an early and earnest student, and projected, if he did not so far proceed with, an elaborate and systematic treatise on the science, of which all that appears, however, are his fragmentary Dialogues on the system of Ricardo, published in the London Magazine in 1824, and The Logic of Political Economy (1844). How wide and varied was the region he traversed a glance at the titles of the papers which make up his collected (or more properly, selected) works (for there was much matter of evanescent interest not reprinted), sufficiently shows. Some things in his own line he has done perfectly ; he has written many pages of magnificently mixed arguments, irony, humour and eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle force and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels ; and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of opium no doubt stimulated this remarkable faculty of reproducing in skilfully selected phrase the grotesque and shifting forms of that "cloudland, gorgeous land," which opens to the sleep-closed eye.
It has been complained that, in spite of the apparently full confidences of the Confessions and Autobiographic Sketches, readers are left in comparative ignorance, biographically speak ing, of the man De Quincey. Two passages in his Confessions afford sufficient clues to this mystery. In one he describes him self "as framed for .love and all gentle affections," and in another confesses to the "besetting infirmity" of being "too much of an eudaemonist." "I hanker," he says, "too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little capable of surmounting present pain for the sake of any recessionary benefit." His sensitive disposition dictated the ignoring in his writings of traits merely personal to himself, as well as his ever-recurrent resort to opium as a doorway of escape from present ill; and prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect of regular hours or any considerations of health or comfort—the habit of working as pleased himself without regard to the divisions of night or day, of times of sleeping or waking, even of the slow procession of the seasons— had latterly so disinclined him to the restraints, however slight, of ordinary social intercourse, that he very seldom submitted to them. On such rare occasions, however, as he did appear, per haps at some simple meal with a favoured friend, or in later years in his own small but refined domestic circle, he was the most charming of guests, hosts or companions. A short and fragile, but well-proportioned frame; a shapely and compact head; a face beaming with intellectual light, with rare, almost feminine beauty of feature and complexion ; a fascinating courtesy of manner ; and a fullness, swiftness and elegance of silvery speech— such was the irresistible "mortal mixture of earth's mould" that men named De Quincey. It was impossible to deal with or judge him by ordinary standards—not even his publishers did so. Much no doubt was forgiven him, but all that needed forgiveness is covered by the kindly veil of time, while his merits as a master in English literature are still gratefully acknowledged. (J. R. F.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-In 1853 De Quincey began to prepare an ed. of Bibliography.-In 1853 De Quincey began to prepare an ed. of his work's Selections Grave and Gay. Writings Published and Un published (1853-6o) , followed by a second ed. (1863-71) with notes by James Hogg and two additional vols. ; a further supplementary vol. appeared in 1878. The first comprehensive ed., however, was printed in America (1850-55) ; and the "Riverside" ed. (1877) is still fuller. The standard English ed. is The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (Edinburgh, 1889-90) , edited by David Masson, who alsoff wrote his biography (1881) for the "English Men of Letters" series. The Uncollected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (189o) contains a preface and annotations by James Hogg; The Posthumous Writings of Thomas De Quincey (1891-93) were edited by A. H. Japp ("H. A. Page") , who wrote the standard biography, Thomas De Quincey: his Life and Writings (2nd ed., 1879), and De Quincey Memorials (1891) . See also Arvede Barine Nevroses (1898) ; Sir L. Stephen Hours in a Library; H. S. Salt De Quincey (1904) ; and De Quincey and his Friends (1895) , a collection edited by James Hogg, which includes essays by Dr. Hill Burton and Shadworth Hodgson. See also editions of the Confessions (192 7) by G. Saintsbury, and of the Diary (1927) by H. A. Eaton.