es) a man who had felt in his own person the infernal pangs and
pleasures consequent upon enormous and almost unique excesses in the use
of that Oriental drug which possesses for us all such a romantic
attraction. He became the "English Opium-Eater"; and even the most
recent and authoritative edition of his writings, that of the late
Professor Masson, did not hesitate in advertisements to avail itself of
a title so familiar and so sensational.

To a great degree, this feeling on the part of the public is natural and
proper. De Quincey's opium habit, begun in his youth under circumstances
that modern physicians have guessed to be justifiable, and continued
throughout the remainder of his life,--at first without self-restraint,
at last in what was for him moderation,--has rendered him a striking and
isolated figure in Western lands.

We have a right eagerly to ask: On this strongly marked temperament, so
delicately imaginative and so keenly logical, so receptive and so
retentive, a type alike of the philosopher and the poet, the scholar and
the musician--on such a contemplative genius, what were the effects of
so great and so constant indulgence in a drug noted for its power of
heightening and extending, for a season, the whole range of the
imaginative faculties?

Justifiable as such feelings may be, however, they tend to wrong De
Quincey's memory and to limit our conceptions of his character and
genius. He was no vulgar opium drunkard; he was, to all appearances,
singularly free even from the petty vices to which eaters of the drug
are supposed to be peculiarly liable. To be sure, he was not without his
eccentricities. He was absent-mindedly careless in his attire, unusual
in his hours of waking and sleeping, odd in his habits of work,
ludicrously ignorant of the value of money, solitary, prone to whims, by
turns reticent and loquacious. But for all his eccentricities, De
Quincey--unlike Poe, for example--is not a possible object for pity or
patronage; they would be foolish who could doubt his word or mistrust
his motives. He was "queer," as most great Englishmen of letters of his
time were; but the more his at first enigmatic character comes to light,
through his own letters and through the recollections of his friends,
the more clearly do we see him to have been a pure-minded and well-bred
man, kind, honest, generous, and gentle. His life was almost wholly
passed among books,--books in many languages, books of many k