DE QUIN'CEY, THOMAS (1785-18.59). A great English prose writer. He was horn in Man chester. where his father had been a successful merchant in the foreign trade, and left at his death an estate producing about 1:1600 a year. The future essayist as a child was retiring and sensitive, alien from the actualities of life; and even before his opium-eating had begun, his natu ral tendency A\ as to live in a dream-world of his own creation. Yet in some directions be made remarkable progress in his studies at the gram mar schools of Bath and Manchester. especially in Greek. "That boy." said one of his teachers, "could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." He ran away from the Manchester school, and had a brief ad venturous career among the Welsh hills and in London. where he remained a year and nearly starved before he was discovered by his family and sent to Worcester College, Oxford. Here he spent five years, though he left the university without a degree. During this period, in 1804, he resorted for the first time to opium as a cure for severe rheumatic pains in the head; and the habit grew upon him as rapidly and to almost as disastrous an extent as it did upon Coleridge, gaining a bold upon him which he was never able entirely to shake off, though by 1S21 he had suc ceeded in reducing the quantity sufficiently to allow regular and sustained work. In IS08 he took up his residence on the borders of Grasmere, attracted thither by his affectionate veneration for Wordsworth and Coleridge. Here he enjoyed their soeiAy and that of Southey and 'Christo pher North', read widely in classical, German, and English literature„ and began to produce his own magnificent contributions to the lat ter. The events of his later years are not very diversified or striking. and it is difficult to trace them accurately from his own autohiographical remains, which have at times the vagueness and inconsequence of his opium dreams. In ISUI he married, and during the rest of his life supported himself and his family almost entirely by his pen, though often embarrassed by the money difficul ties which seem inseparable from a certain type of literary genius. After several years spent in
London. his connection with Blackwood's Maga :me drew him to Edinburgh. in or near which be spent the rest of his life. finding a grave there in the West Churehyard.
Nearly all his work appeared first in periodi eals—Blarktood's. Tait's, and the London Maga zine: but its remarkable qualities led to its pres ervation from the fate of merely ephemeral literature. Ilis first great suecess was the con fessions of an English Opium-Eater, which ap peared in the London Magazine in 1821, and at tracted universal attention. Only a small part of it is devoted to the results of the drug, the rest being a fascinating, if discursive, sketch of the scenes and surroundings of his life up to that It was ultimately supplemented by the darker Suspiria de Profundis (1845), made up of the marvelous and terrible imaginings inspired by opium. His grim humor is well represented by Murder Consider«1 as (The of the fine ,zirts (1827). and the penetration of his imaginative criticism by his essay On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth (182:i). Special mention may also lie made of his Letters to a Young Man (1823), and of his essays on Style and Rhetoric (1840) ; on Joan of Are (1847), and The English, Mail Coach (1849). A series of about thirty articles, collected in 185:3 under the title of uto biographic Sketches, is also of great interest. In criticism. De Quincey must be regarded very highly: his view of things might be called essen tially analytical. His Literary Reminiscences embraces broad views of Lamb, Coleridge, Words worth, Southey, and others, and there are also studies of Shelley, Keats, Goldsmith, Pope, God win, Ilazlitt, Landon. etc. It is difficult to find critical matter so luminous and scientific, and the style, at its best incomparable, is as brilliant as the judgments are just.