inds and
times. These he incessantly read and annotated. And the treasures of
this wide reading, stored in a retentive and imaginative mind, form the
basis of almost all his work that is not distinctly autobiographical.

De Quincey's writings, as collected by himself (and more recently by
Professor Masson), fill fourteen good-sized volumes, and consist of
about two hundred and fifteen separate pieces, all of which were
contributed to various periodicals between 1813, when at the age of
thirty-eight he suddenly found himself and his family dependent for
support on his literary efforts, to his death in 1859. Books, sustained
efforts of construction, he did not except in a single instance, and
probably could not, produce; his mind held rich stores of information on
many subjects, but his habit of thought was essentially non-consecutive
and his method merely that of the brilliant talker, who illumines
delightfully many a subject, treating none, however, with reserved power
and thorough care. His attitude toward his work, it is worth while to
notice, was an admirable one. His task was often that of a hack writer;
his spirit never. His life was frugal and modest in the extreme; and
though writing brought him bread and fame, he seems never, in any
recorded instance, to have concerned himself with its commercial value.
He wrote from a full mind and with genuine inspiration, and lived and
died a man of letters from pure love of letters and not of worldly gain.

As we have noticed, it is the autobiographical part of De Quincey's
writing--the 'Confessions' of one who could call every day for "a glass
of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar"--that has made him famous,
and which deserves first our critical attention. It consists of four or
five hundred pages of somewhat disconnected sketches, including the
'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' and 'Suspiria de Profundis.' De
Quincey himself speaks of them as "a far higher class of composition"
than his philosophical or historical writings,--declaring them to be,
unlike the comparatively matter-of-fact memoirs of Rousseau and St.
Augustine, "modes of impassioned prose, ranging under no precedents
that I am aware of in any literature." What De Quincey attempted was to
clothe in words scenes from the world of dreams,--a lyric fashion, as it
were, wholly in keeping with contemporary taste and aspiration, which
under the penetrating influence of romanticism were maintaining the
poe