e
inserted at the close of the first section of 'The Caesars,' but was at
the last moment overlooked, though without it the text there, as it
stands in the Collected Works, is, for De Quincey, perhaps too hurried
and business-like.

IV. The little article on '_Cicero_' is evidently meant as a
supplementary note to the article on that eminent man, as it appears in
the Collected Works. Why De Quincey, when preparing these volumes for
the press, did not work it into his text is puzzling, as it develops
happily some points which he has there dwelt on, and presents in a very
effective and compact style the mingled feelings with which the great
Proconsul quitted his office in Cilicia, and his feelings on arriving at
Rome.

V. _Memorial Chronology._--This is a continuation of that already
published under the same title in the Collected Works. In a note from
the publishers, preceding the portion already given in the sixteenth
volume of the original edition, and the fourteenth of Professor Masson's
edition, it is said: 'This article was written about twenty years ago
[1850], and is printed here for the first time from the author's _MS_.
It was his intention to have continued the subject, but this was never
done.' From the essay we now present it will be seen that this last
statement is only in a modified sense true--the more that the portion
published in the Messrs. Black's editions is, on the whole, merely
introductory, and De Quincey's peculiar _technica memoria_ is not there
even indicated, which it is, with some degree of clearness, in the
following pages, and these may be regarded as presenting at least the
leading outlines of what the whole series would have been.

De Quincey's method, after having fixed a definite accepted point of
departure, was to link the memory of events to a period made signal by
identity of figures. Thus, he finds the fall of Assyria, the first of
the Olympiads, and the building of Rome to date from about the year 777
B.C. That is his starting-point in definite chronology. Then he takes up
the period from 777 to 555; from 555 to 333, and so on.

De Quincey was writing professedly for ladies only, and not for
scholars; and that his acknowledged leading obstacle was the
semi-mythical wilderness of all early oriental history is insisted on
with emphasis. The way in which he triumphs over this obstacle is
certainly characteristic and ingenious. Though the latter part is
fragmentary, it is suggestiv