ever is known about him to any body;
and in sketching the events of his life, the recorder has little more to
do than to indicate facts which may be found fully expanded in Mr. De
Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-eater" and "Autobiographic Sketches."
The business which he, in fact, left for others to do is that which, in
spite of obvious impossibility, he was incessantly endeavoring to do
himself--that of analyzing and forming a representation and judgment of
his mind, and of his life as molded by his mind. The most intense
metaphysician of a time remarkable for the predominance of metaphysical
modes of thought, he was as completely unaware, as smaller men of his
mental habits, that in his perpetual self-study and analysis he was
never approaching the truth, for the simple reason that he was not even
within ken of the necessary point of view. "I," he says, "whose disease
it was to meditate too much and to observe too little." And the
description was a true one, as far as it went. And the completion of the
description was one which he could never have himself arrived at. It
must, we think, be concluded of De Quincey that he was the most
remarkable instance in his time of a more than abnormal, of an
artificial, condition of body and mind--a characterization which he must
necessarily be the last man to conceive of. To understand this, it is
necessary to glance at the events of his life. The briefest notice will
suffice, as they are within the reach of all, as related in his own
books.
Thomas De Quincey was the son of a merchant engaged in foreign commerce,
and was born at Manchester in 1786. He was one of eight children, of
whom no more than six were ever living at once, and several of whom died
in infancy. The survivors were reared in a country home, the incidents
of which, when of a kind to excite emotion, impressed themselves on this
singular child's memory from a very early age. We have known only two
instances, in a rather wide experience of life, of persons distinctly
remembering so far back as a year and a half old. This was De Quincey's
age when three deaths happened in the family, which he remembered, not
by tradition, but by his own contemporary emotions. A sister of three
and a half died, and he was perplexed by her disappearance, and
terrified by the household whisper that she had been ill-used just
before her death by a servant. A grandmother died about the same time,
leaving little impression, because she
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