t he wrote. Even in _The Revolt of the Tartars_ the romantic element is
uppermost, and in much of De Quincey's prose the element of unreality is
more noticeable than in Shelley's poetry. Of his subject-matter, his facts,
ideas, and criticisms, we are generally suspicious; but of his style,
sometimes stately and sometimes headlong, now gorgeous as an Oriental
dream, now musical as Keats's _Endymion_, and always, even in the most
violent contrasts, showing a harmony between the idea and the expression
such as no other English writer, with the possible exception of Newman, has
ever rivaled,--say what you will of the marvelous brilliancy of De
Quincey's style, you have still only half expressed the truth. It is the
style alone which makes these essays immortal.

LIFE. De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. In neither his father, who
was a prosperous merchant, nor his mother, who was a quiet, unsympathetic
woman, do we see any suggestion of the son's almost uncanny genius. As a
child he was given to dreams, more vivid and intense but less beautiful
than those of the young Blake to whom he bears a strong resemblance. In the
grammar school at Bath he displayed astonishing ability, and acquired Greek
and Latin with a rapidity that frightened his slow tutors. At fifteen he
not only read Greek, but spoke it fluently; and one of his astounded
teachers remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you
or I could address an English one." From the grammar school at Manchester,
whither he was sent in 1800, he soon ran away, finding the instruction far
below his abilities, and the rough life absolutely intolerable to his
sensitive nature. An uncle, just home from India, interceded for the boy
lest he be sent back to the school, which he hated; and with an allowance
of a guinea a week he started a career of vagrancy, much like that of
Goldsmith, living on the open hills, in the huts of shepherds and charcoal
burners, in the tents of gypsies, wherever fancy led him. His fear of the
Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without
money or friends, his life was even more extraordinary than his gypsy
wanderings. The details of this vagrancy are best learned in his
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, where we meet not simply the facts
of his life, but also the confusion of dreams and fancies in the midst of
which he wandered like a man lost on the mountains, with storm clouds under
his feet hid