est lines. This kind of discovery

Cogit amare _minus_, _nec_ bene velle _magis_.

How and to what extent this is the case, it must be the business of this
paper to attempt to show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual,
a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for
the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be
said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson,
very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was
mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two
after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic
relations, which seems to have had no foundation whatever, but which
pretty evidently was an echo of the "libel" (published in a short-lived
newspaper of the kind which after many years has again risen to infest
London) whereof he complains with perhaps more acrimony than dignity in
a paper for the first time exhumed and reprinted in Professor Masson's
edition. Many of the details of the _Confessions_ and the
_Autobiography_ have a singular unbelievableness as one reads them; and
though the tendency of recent biographers has been to accept them as on
the whole genuine, I own that I am rather sceptical about many of them
still. Was the ever-famous Malay a real Malay, or a thing of shreds and
patches? Did De Quincey actually call upon the awful Dean Cyril Jackson
and affably discuss with him the propriety of entering himself at
Christ-church? Did he really journey pennilessly down to Eton on the
chance of finding a casual peer of the realm of tender years who would
back a bill for him? These are but a few out of a large number of
questions which in idle moods (for the answer to hardly one of them is
of the least importance) suggest themselves; and which have been very
partially answered hitherto even of late years, though they have been
much discussed. The plain and tolerably certain facts which are
important in connection with his work may be pretty rapidly summed up.

Thomas de Quincey, or Quincey, was born in Manchester--but apparently
not, as he himself thought, at the country house of Greenhay which his
parents afterwards inhabited--on 15th August 1785. His father was a
merchant, well to do but of weak health, who died when Thomas was seven
years old. Of his childhood he has left very copious reminiscences, and
there is no doubt that reminiscences of childhood do linger long after