in his composition. Deal with him as a man, you
found a bright, kindly, nervous little man in a chronic state of
shabbiness, eluding the attention of friends so far as possible, and
wandering about town and country as if he had nothing in common with the
rest of mankind. His Vagabondage is shown best in his purely imaginative
work, and in the autobiographical sketches.

Small and insignificant in appearance to the casual observer, there was
something arresting, fascinating about the man that touched even the
irascible Carlyle. Much of his work, one can well understand, seemed to
this lover of facts "full of wire-drawn ingenuities." But with all his
contempt for phantasy, there was a touch of the dreamer in Carlyle, and
the imaginative beauty, apart from the fanciful prettiness in De
Quincey's work, would have appealed to him. For there was power,
intellectual grip, behind the shifting fancies, and both as a critic and
historian he has left behind him memorable work. As critic he has been
taken severely to task for his judgments on French writers and on many
lights of eighteenth-century thought. Certainly De Quincey's was not the
type of mind we should go to for an interpretative criticism of the
eighteenth century. Yet we must not forget his admirable appreciation of
Goldsmith. At his best, as in his criticism of Milton and Wordsworth, he
shows a fine, delicate, analytical power, which it is hard to overpraise.

"Obligations to Gombrom" do not afford the best qualification for the
historian. One can imagine the hair rising in horror on the head of the
late Professor Freeman at the idea of the opium-eater sitting down
seriously to write history.

Yet he had, like Froude, the power of seizing upon the spectacular side
of great movements which many a more accurate historian has lacked.
Especially striking is his _Revolt of the Tartars_--the flight eastward
of a Tartar nation across the vast steppes of Asia, from Russia to
Chinese territory. Ideas impressed him rather than facts, and episodes
rather than a continuous chain of events. But when he was interested, he
had the power of describing with picturesque power certain dramatic
episodes in a nation's history.

A characteristic of the literary Vagabond is the eager versatility of his
intellectual interests. He will follow any path that promises to be
interesting, not so much with the scholar's patient investigation as with
the pedestrian's delight in "fres