ed to his own devices by his mother and
his guardians, as surely no mother and no guardians ever abandoned an
exceptionally unworldly boy of eighteen before. They seem to have put
fifty guineas in his pocket and sent him up to Oxford, without even
recommending him a college, and with an income which made it practically
certain that he would once more seek the Jews. When he had spent so much
of his fifty guineas that there was not enough left to pay caution-money
at most colleges, he went to Worcester, where it happened to be low. He
seems to have stayed there, on and off, for nearly six years. But he
took no degree, his eternal caprices making him shun _viva voce_ (then a
much more important part of the examination than it is now) after
sending in unusually good written papers. Instead of taking a degree, he
began to take opium, and to make acquaintance with the "Lakers" in both
their haunts of Somerset and Westmoreland. He entered himself at the
Middle Temple, he may have eaten some dinners, and somehow or other he
"came into his property," though there are dire surmises that it was by
the Hebrew door. At any rate in November 1809 he gave up both Oxford and
London (which he had frequented a good deal, chiefly, he says, for the
sake of the opera of which he was very fond), and established himself at
Grasmere. One of the most singular things about his singular life--an
oddity due, no doubt, in part to the fact that he outlived his more
literary associates instead of being outlived by them--is that though we
hear much from De Quincey of other people we hear extremely little from
other people about De Quincey. Indeed what we do so hear dates almost
entirely from the last days of his life.

As for the autobiographic details in his _Confessions_ and elsewhere,
anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself.
It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a
recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society
now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's
daughter, of whom we have hardly any personal notices save to the effect
that she was very beautiful, and who seems to have been almost the most
exemplary of wives to almost the most eccentric of husbands; that for
most of the time he was in more or less ease and affluence (ease and
affluence still, it would seem, of a treacherous Hebraic origin); and
that about 1819 he found himself in great