pecuniary difficulties. Then
at length he turned to literature, started as editor of a little Tory
paper at Kendal, went to London, and took rank, never to be cancelled,
as a man of letters by the first part of _The Confessions of an
Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_ for 1821. He began as a
magazine-writer, and he continued as such till the end of his life; his
publications in book-form being, till he was induced to collect his
articles, quite insignificant. Between 1821 and 1825 he seems to have
been chiefly in London, though sometimes at Grasmere; between 1825 and
1830 chiefly at Grasmere, but much in Edinburgh, where Wilson (whose
friendship he had secured, not at Oxford, though they were
contemporaries, but at the Lakes) was now residing, and where he was
introduced to Blackwood. In 1830 he moved his household to the Scotch
capital, and lived there, and (after his wife's death in 1837) at
Lasswade, or rather Polton, for the rest of his life. His affairs had
come to their worst before he lost his wife, and it is now known that
for some considerable time he lived, like Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, in
the sanctuary of Holyrood. But De Quincey's way of "living" at any place
was as mysterious as most of his other ways; and, though he seems to
have been very fond of his family and not at all put out by them, it was
his constant habit to establish himself in separate lodgings. These he
as constantly shifted (sometimes as far as Glasgow) for no intelligible
reason that has ever been discovered or surmised, his pecuniary troubles
having long ceased. It was in the latest and most permanent of these
lodgings, 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, not at Lasswade, that he died on
the 8th of December 1859. He had latterly written mainly, though not
solely, for _Tait's Magazine_ and _Hogg's Instructor_. But his chief
literary employment for at least seven years before this, had been the
arrangement of the authorised edition of his works, the last or
fourteenth volume of which was in the press at the time of his death.

So meagre are the known facts in a life of seventy-four years, during
nearly forty of which De Quincey, though never popular, was still
recognised as a great name in English letters, while during the same
period he knew, and was known to, not a few distinguished men. But
little as is recorded of the facts of his life, even less is recorded of
his character, and for once it is almost impossible to discover that