ing the familiar earth. After a year of vagrancy and starvation
he was found by his family and allowed to go to Oxford, where his career
was marked by the most brilliant and erratic scholarship. When ready for a
degree, in 1807, he passed his written tests successfully, but felt a
sudden terror at the thought of the oral examination and disappeared from
the university, never to return.

It was in Oxford that De Quincey began the use of opium; to relieve the
pains of neuralgia, and the habit increased until he was an almost hopeless
slave to the drug. Only his extraordinary will power enabled him to break
away from the habit, after some thirty years of misery. Some peculiarity of
his delicate constitution enabled De Quincey to take enormous quantities of
opium, enough to kill several ordinary men; and it was largely opium,
working upon a sensitive imagination, which produced his gorgeous dreams,
broken by intervals of weakness and profound depression. For twenty years
he resided at Grasmere in the companionship of the Lake poets; and here,
led by the loss of his small fortune, he began to write, with the idea of
supporting his family. In 1821 he published his first famous work, the
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, and for nearly forty years
afterwards he wrote industriously, contributing to various magazines an
astonishing number of essays on a great variety of subjects. Without
thought of literary fame, he contributed these articles anonymously; but
fortunately, in 1853, he began to collect his own works, and the last of
fourteen volumes was published just after his death.

In 1830, led by his connection with _Blackwood's Magazine_, to which he was
the chief contributor, De Quincey removed with his family to Edinburgh,
where his erratic genius and his singularly childlike ways produced enough
amusing anecdotes to fill a volume. He would take a room in some place
unknown to his friends and family; would live in it for a few years, until
he had filled it, even to the bath tub, with books and with his own chaotic
manuscripts, allowing no one to enter or disturb his den; and then, when
the place became too crowded, he would lock the door and go away and take
another lodging, where he repeated the same extraordinary performance. He
died in Edinburgh in 1859. Like Lamb, he was a small, boyish figure,
gentle, and elaborately courteous. Though excessively shy, and escaping as
often as possible to solitude, he was neverth