character from his works. The few persons who met him all agree as to
his impenetrability,--an impenetrability not in the least due to posing,
but apparently natural and fated. De Quincey was at once egotistic and
impersonal, at once delighted to talk and resolutely shunning society.
To him, one is tempted to say, reading and writing did come by nature,
and nothing else was natural at all. With books he is always at home. A
De Quincey in a world where there was neither reading nor writing of
books, would certainly either have committed suicide or gone mad. Pope's
theory of the master-passion, so often abused, justified itself here.

The quantity of work produced during this singular existence, from the
time when De Quincey first began, unusually late, to write for
publication, was very large. As collected by the author, it filled
fourteen volumes; the collection was subsequently enlarged to sixteen,
and though the new edition promises to restrict itself to the older and
lesser number, the contents of each volume have been very considerably
increased. But this printed and reprinted total, so far as can be judged
from De Quincey's own assertions and from the observations of those who
were acquainted with him during his later years, must have been but the
smaller part of what he actually wrote. He was always writing, and
always leaving deposits of his manuscripts in the various lodgings where
it was his habit to bestow himself. The greater part of De Quincey's
writing was of a kind almost as easily written by so full a reader and
so logical a thinker as an ordinary newspaper article by an ordinary
man; and except when he was sleeping, wandering about, or reading, he
was always writing. It is, of course, true that he spent a great deal of
time, especially in his last years of all, in re-writing and
re-fashioning previously executed work; and also that illness and opium
made considerable inroads on his leisure. But I should imagine that if
we had all that he actually wrote during these nearly forty years, forty
or sixty printed volumes would more nearly express its amount than
fourteen or sixteen.

Still what we have is no mean bulk of work for any man to have
accomplished, especially when it is considered how extraordinarily good
much of it is. To classify it is not particularly easy; and I doubt,
myself, whether any classification is necessary. De Quincey himself
tried, and made rather a muddle of it. Professor Masson is t