or being there, removed me to a far better
school kept by E. C. Wines, who had written books on education, and
attained some fame thereby. This was in 1839-'40, and I was there to be
prepared for college. We were soon introduced to an old French
gentleman, who was to teach us, and who asked the other boys what French
works they had read. Some had gone through _Telemaque_, or _Paul et
Virginie_, _Florian_, _etcetera_. The good-goody nature of such reading
awoke in me my sense of humour. When it came to my turn, and I was
asked, I replied, "_La Pucelle d'Orleans_ and _Dictionnaire
Philosophique_ of Voltaire, the Confessions of Rousseau, the Poems of
Villon, _Charles d'Orleans_, _Clotilde de Surville_, and more or less of
Helvetius, D'Holbach, and Condillac." Here the professor, feeling
himself quizzed, cast forth his hands as in disgust and horror, and
cried, "_Assez_! _assez_! Unhappy boy, you have raked through the
library of the devil down to the dregs!" Nor was I "selling" him, for I
certainly had read the works, as the records of the Philadelphia Library
can in a great measure prove, and did not speak by hearsay.

I had at this time several severe long attacks of illness with much pain,
which I always bore well, as a matter of course or habit. But rather
oddly, while in the midst of my Transcendentalism, and reading every
scrap of everything about Germany which I could get, and metaphysics, and
study--I was very far gone then, and used to go home from school and
light a pipe with a long wooden stem, and study the beloved "Critic of
Pure Reason" or Carlyle's Miscellanies, having discovered that smoking
was absolutely necessary in such reading--[De Quincey required a quart of
laudanum to enable him to enjoy German metaphysics]--there came a strange
gleam of worldly dissipation, of which I never think without pleasure. I
had passed one summer vacation on a farm near Philadelphia, where I
learned something in wood-ranging about wild herbs and catching
land-tortoises and "coon-hunting," and had been allowed to hire and ride
a horse.

I did not know it, but this horse had thrown over his head everybody who
had ever mounted him. He was a perfect devil, but also a perfect
gentleman. He soon took my measure, and resolved to treat me kindly as a
_protege_. When we both wanted a gallop, he made such time as nobody
before had dreamed was in him; when he was lazy, he only had to turn his
head and look at me, and I k