The Sun.
London, England, 1859-12-10 00:00:00

THOMAS DE Q UI/VOLT.

Thomas Do Quincey died at Edinburgh on
Thursday, December 8, at 10 o'clock a.m., in his
75th year.
In noticing, on the occasion of his departure
from us, the life and character of De Quincey, none
of the doubt and hesitation occur which render the
task generally embarrassing as to what to commu-
nicate to the public and what to suppress. The
" English Opium Eater" has himself told publicly,
throughout a period of between thirty and forty
years, whatever is known about him to anybody ;
and, in sketching the events of his life, the recorder
has little more to do than to indicate facts which
may be found fully expanded in Mr. De Quincey's
" Confessions of an Opium Eater," and " katobio-
graphic Sketches." The business which he has, in
fact, left for others to do is that which, in spite of
obvious impossibility, he was incessantly endea-
vouring to do himself—that of analysing and form-
ing a representation and judgment of his mind. and
of his life as moulded by his mind. The most in-
tense metaphysician of a time remarkable for the
predominance of metaphysical modes of thought,
he was as completely unaware as smaller men of
his mental habits that in his perpetual self-study
and anlysis he was never approaching the truth,
for the simple reason that he was not even within
ken of the necessary point of view. " I," he says,
" whose disease it was to meditate too much, and to
observe too little." And the description was a true
one, as far as it went. And the completion of the de-
scription was one which he could never have himself
arrived at. It must, we think, be concluded of De
Quincey that he was the most remarkable instance
in his time of a more than abnormal, of an
artificial condition of body and mind—a characteri-
sation which he must necessarily be the last man to
conceive of. To understand this, it is necessary to
glance at the events of his life. The briefest notice
will suffice, as they are within the reach of all, as
related in his own books.

Thomas De Quincey was the son of a merchant
engaged in foreign commerce, and was born at
Manchester in 1786. He was one of eight children,
of whom no more than six were ever living at once,
and several of whom died in infancy. The survivors
were reared in a country home, the incidents of
which, when of a kind to excite emotion, impressed
themselves on this singular child's memory from a
very early age. We have known only two instances,
in a rather wide experience of life, of persons dis-
tinctly remembering so far back as a year and a half
old. This was De Quincey's ago when three deaths
happened in the family, which he remembered, not
by tradition, but by his own contemporary emotions.
A sister of three-and-a-half died ; and he was per-
plexed by her disappearance, and terrified by the
household whisper that she had been ill-used, just
before her death, by a servant. A grandmother died
about the same time, leaving little impression, be-
cause she had been little seen. The other death was
of a beloved kingfisher by a doleful accident, When
the boy was five he lost his playfellow, and, as he
says, intellectual guide—his sister Elizabeth, eight
years old, dying of hydrocephalus, after manifesting
an intellectual power which the forlorn brother re-
called with admiration and wonder for life. The
impression was undoubtedly genuine; but it is im-
possible to read the " Autobiographical Sketch"
in which the death and funeral of the child are
described without perceiving that the writer referred
back to the period he was describing with emotions
and reflex sensations which arose in him, and fell
from the pen at the moment. His father meantime
was residing abroad, year after year, as a condition
of his living at all; and he died of pulmonary con-
sumption before Thomas was seven years old. The
elder brother, then 12, was obviously too eccentric
for home management, if not for all control; and
looking no further than these constitutional cases,
we are warranted in concluding that the Opium
Eater entered life under peculiar and unfavourable
conditions.

He paned through a succession of schools, and
was distinguished by his eminent knowledge of
Greek. At 15 he was pointed out by his master
(himself a ripe scholar) to a stranger in the remark-
able words, "That boy could harangue an Athenian
mob better than you or I could address an English
one." And it was not only the Greek, we imagine,
but must have been the eloquence too that was in-
cluded in this praise. In this, as in the subtlety
of the analytical power (so strangely mistaken for
entire intellectual supremacy in our day), De
Quincey must have strongly resembled Coleridge.
Both were fine Grecians, charming discoursers,
eminent opium takers, magnificent dreamers and
seem large in their promises, and helpless in their
failure of performance. De Quincey set his heart
upon going to college earlier than his guardians
thought propEr ; and, on his being disappointed
in this matter, he ran away from his tutor's
house, and was lost for several months—
first in Wales, and afterwards in London. He was
then sixteen. His whole life presents no more re-
markable evidence of his constant absorption in
introspection than the fact that while tortured with
hunger in the streets of London for many weeks, and
sleeping (or rather lying awake with cold and
hunger) on the floor of an empty house, it never
once occurred to him to earn money. As a classical
corrector of the press, and in other ways, he might
no doubt have obtained employment ; but it was not
till afterwards asked why he did not, that the idea
ever entered his mind. How he starved, how he
would have died but for a glass of spiced wine in
the middle of the night on some steps in Soho-
square, the Opium Eater told all the world above
thirty years since ; and also, of his entering col-
lege ; of the love of wine generated by the comfort
it had yielded in his days of starvation ; and again,
of the disorder of the functions of the stomach which
naturally followed, and the resort to opium as a
refuge from the pain. It is to be feared that the
description given in those extraordinary " Confes-
sions" has acted more strongly in tempting young
people to seek the eight years' pleasures he derived
from laudanum than that of his subsequent torments
in deterring them. There was no one to present to
them the consideration that the peculiar organisation
of De Quincey, and his bitter sufferings, might well
make a recourse to opium a different thing to him
and to anybody else. The quality of his mind, and
the exhausted state of his body, enhanced to him the
enjoyments which he called " divine ;" whereas
there is no doubt of the miserable pain by which
men of all constitutions have to expatiate a habitual
indulgence in opium. It may or it may not be that
others may, one or all, procure the pleasures he ex-
perienced, but it is certain that every one must
expiate his offence against the laws of the human
frame. And let it be remembered that De Quincey's
excuse is as singular as his excess. Of the many
who have emulated his enjoyment, there can hardly
have been one whose stomach had been well nigh
destroyed by months of incessant, cruel hunger.
This event of his life—his resort to opium—ab-
sorbed all the rest. There is little more to tell in

the way of incident. His existence was thence-
forth a series of dreams, undergone in different
places—now at college and now in a Westmoreland
cottage with a gentle suffering wife by his side,
striving to minister to a need which was beyond
the reach of nursing. He could amuse his predo-
minant faculties by reading metaphysical philo-
sophy, and analytical reasoning on any subject ;
and by elaborating endless analyses and reasonings
of his own, which he had not energy to embody.
Occasionally the torpor encroached even on his
predominant faculties ; and then he roused himself
to overcome the habit—underwent fearful suffer-

ing in the weaning—began to enjoy the vital hap-
piness of temperance and health ; and then—fell
back again. The influence upon the moral energies
of his nature was, as might be supposed, fatal.
Such energy he once had, as his earlier efforts
at endurance amply testify. But as years passed
on he net only became a more helpless victim
to his prominent vice, but manifested an in-
creasing insensibility to the most ordinary requisi-
tions of honour and courtesy, to say nothing of gra-
titude and sincerity. In his hungry days in Lon-
don he would not beg or borrow. Five years later
he wrote to Wordsworth, in admiration and sym-
pathy, received an invitation to his Westmoreland
valley, went, more than once, within a few miles,
and withdrew and returned to Oxford, unable to
conquer his painful shyness—returned at last to
live there, in the very cottage which had been
Wordsworth's ; received for himself, his wife, and a
growing family of children an uniutermitting series
of friendly and neighbourly offices ; was necessarily
admitted to much household confidence, and
favoured with substantial aid, which was certainly
not given through any strong liking for his man-
ners, conversation, or character. How did he re-
compense all this exertion and endurance on his
behalf P In after years, when living (we believe) at
Edinburgh, and pressed by debt, he did for once
exert himself to write; and what he wrote was an
exposure, in a disadvantageous light, of everything
about the Wordsworths which he knew merely by
their kindness. Ho wrote papers which were eagerly
read, and of course duly paid for, in which Words-
worth's personal foibles were malignantly exhibited
with ingenious aggravations. The infirmities of one
member of the family, the personal blemish of
another, and the human weaknesses of all, were
displayed; and all for the purpose of deepening the
dislike against Wordsworth himself, which the
receiver of his money, the eater of his dinners, and
the dreary provoker of his patience, strove to excite.
Moreover, he perpetrated an act of treachery scarcely
paralleled, we hope, in the history of literature. In
the confidence of their most familiar days Words-
worth had communicated portions of his posthu-
mous poems to his guest, who was perfectly well
aware that the work was to rest in darkness and
silence till after the poet's death. In these magazine
articles De Quincey—using for this atrocious pur-