later memories have disappeared. But to what extent De Quincey gave
"cocked hats and canes" to his childish thoughts and to his relations
with his brothers and sisters, individual judgment must decide. I should
say, for my part, that the extent was considerable. It seems, however,
pretty clear that he was as a child, very much what he was all his
life--emphatically "old-fashioned," retiring without being exactly shy,
full of far-brought fancies and yet intensely concentrated upon himself.
In 1796 his mother moved to Bath, and Thomas was educated first at the
Grammar School there and then at a private school in Wiltshire. It was
at Bath, his headquarters being there, that he met various persons of
distinction--Lord Westport, Lord and Lady Carbery, and others--who
figure largely in the _Autobiography_, but are never heard of
afterwards. It was with Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than
himself, that he took a trip to Ireland, the only country beyond Great
Britain that he visited. In 1800 he was sent by his guardians to the
Manchester Grammar School in order to obtain, by three years' boarding
there, one of the Somerset Exhibitions to Brasenose. As a separate
income of L150 had been left by De Quincey's father to each of his sons,
as this income, or part of it, must have been accumulating, and as the
mother was very well off, this roundabout way of securing for him a
miserable forty or fifty pounds a year seems strange enough. But it has
to be remembered that for all these details we have little security but
De Quincey himself. However, that he did go to Manchester, and did,
after rather more than two of his three years' probation, run away is
indisputable. His mother was living at Chester, and the calf was not
killed for this prodigal son; but he had liberty given him to wander
about Wales on an allowance of a guinea a week. That there is some
mystery, or mystification, about all this is nearly certain. If things
really went as he represents them, his mother ought to have been
ashamed of herself, and his guardians ought to have had, to say the
least, an experience of the roughest side of Lord Eldon's tongue. The
wanderings in Wales were followed by the famous sojourn in Soho, with
its waitings at money-lenders' doors, and its perambulations of Oxford
Street. Then, by another sudden revolution, we find De Quincey with
two-thirds of his allowance handed over to him and permission to go to
Oxford as he wished, but abandon