ENGLISH MAIL COACH, The. Thomas De Quincey's 'The English Mail. Coach' consists of three sections, the first of which appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Macy:t rine in October 1849, with the added title, 'On the Glory of Motion,' and with no intima tion that more was to follow. In December appeared what the author subsequently, in the collective edition of his writings, called II The Vision of Sudden Death,' and 'Section III, Dream-Fugue, Founded on the Preceding Theme of Sudden Death.' It would seem that the 'Dream-Fugue' was composed in 1844 (when De Quincey had virtually conquered the opium habit), and the two introductory sections five years later; these are, then, subordinate to the (Dream-Fugue,' which is a specimen of De Quincey's rhythmical, ((impassioned) prose the medium which, for his special purpose, he preferred to metre. English Mail Coach' being a kind of sequel to 'The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,> the 'Dream Fugue,' as the author would have us believe, constitutes one of the poetical dreams, full of beauty and terror, which arose from his indulgence in opium, though based upon actual occurrences in his life. Accordingly, in Section I, his experi
ences while a student at Oxford, traveling to and fro by coach during the time of the Napo leonic war, are related, with much circumstance and digression, in a less impassioned style; in Section II is recounted an accident on the road, in which a young man and girl in a frail carriage narrowly escape destruction from the flying mail coach; and in Section III ciliates tions from these themes are elaborated in a highly ornate style, the ((musics of which is in deed beautiful, though the value of the content is slight. The allusions to Waterloo, and to the way the news of the battle spread through England, give the document an interest for the historian. Consult Hart's edition of (The Eng lish Mail Coach) (New York 1893); and Cooper, (The Prose Poetry of Thomas De Quincey) (Leipzig 1902).