ar higher
merit than any thing else we had to expect. And what was Wordsworth's
conduct under this unequaled experience of bad faith and bad feeling?
While so many anecdotes were going of the poet's fireside, the following
ought to be added: An old friend was talking with him by that fireside,
and mentioned DeQuincey's magazine articles. Wordsworth begged to be
spared any account of them, saying that the man had long passed away
from the family life and mind, and that he did not wish to ruffle
himself in a useless way about a misbehavior which could not be
remedied. The friend acquiesced, saying: "Well, I will tell you only one
thing that he says, and then we will talk of other things. He says your
wife is too good for you." The old poet's dim eyes lighted up instantly,
and he started from his seat and flung himself against the mantel-piece,
with his back to the fire, as he cried with loud enthusiasm: "And that's
_true! There_ he is right!" And his disgust and contempt for the traitor
were visibly moderated.

During a long course of years DeQuincey went on dreaming always,
sometimes scheming works of high value and great efficacy, which were
never to exist; promising largely to booksellers and others, and failing
through a weakness so deep-seated that it should have prevented his
making any promises. When his three daughters were grown up, and his
wife was dead, he lived in a pleasant cottage at Lasswade, near
Edinburgh, well-known by name to those who have never seen its beauties
as the scene of Scott's early married life and first great achievements
in literature. There, while the family fortunes were expressly made
contingent on his abstinence from his drug, DeQuincey did abstain, or
observe moderation. His flow of conversation was then the delight of old
acquaintance and admiring strangers, who came to hear the charmer and to
receive the impression, which could never be lost, of the singular
figure and countenance and the finely modulated voice, which were like
nothing else in the world. It was a strange thing to look upon the
fragile form and features, which might be those of a dying man, and to
hear such utterances as his--now the strangest comments and
insignificant incidents; now pregnant remarks on great subjects, and
then malignant gossip, virulent and base, but delivered with an air and
a voice of philosophical calmness and intellectual commentary such as
caused the disgust of the listener to be largely quali