ommunity. We forgive
their eccentricity, their lack of fine humor, the most rigid logic, or
the highest learning. We do not attempt to reply to them. It is enough
if the stream of discourse flows gently on from their lips. A rich and
well-modulated vocabulary, finely turned phrases, amusing quips and
conceits of fancy, acute observations, a rich store of recondite
learning, these charm and hold us. Such a talker, such a writer, was De
Quincey. Such was his task, to amuse, to interest, and at times to
instruct us. One deeper note he struck rarely, but always with the
master's hand, the vibrating note felt in passages characteristic of
immensity, solitude, grandeur; and it is to that note that De Quincey
owes the individuality of his style and his fame.

There are few facts in De Quincey's long career that bear directly on
the criticism of his works. Like Ruskin, he was the son of a well-to-do
and cultivated merchant, but the elder De Quincey unfortunately died too
early to be of any help in life to his impulsive and unpractical boy,
who quarreled with his guardians, ran away from school, and neglected
his routine duties at Oxford. His admiration for Wordsworth and
Coleridge led him to the Lake country, where he married and settled
down. The necessity of providing for his family at last aroused him from
his life of meditation and indulgence in opium, and brought him into
connection with the periodicals of the day. After the death of his wife
in 1840 he moved with his children to the vicinity of Edinburgh, where
in somewhat eccentric solitude he spent the last twenty years of his
uneventful life.

[Illustration: Signature]

CHARLES LAMB

From 'Biographical Essays'

It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in
every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest
much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential
_non_-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in
conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world they
are _not_ interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion. Not as
though it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book, that the
majority of men had found it repulsive. _Prima facie_, it must suggest
some presumption _against_ a book that it has failed to gain public
attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud
against its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a goo