periodical introduced a fresh flight of birds of passage (as journalists
both fortunate and unfortunate may peculiarly be called) to English
literature. De Quincey was born in 1785 (the same year as his friend
Wilson) at Manchester, where his father was a merchant of means. He was
educated at the Grammar School of his native town, after some
preliminary teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother had moved after
his father's death. He did not like Manchester, and when he had nearly
served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, he ran
away and hid himself. He went to Oxford after all, entering at
Worcester, where he made a long though rather intermittent residence,
but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his abode at Grasmere, married
after a time, and lived there, at least as his headquarters, for more
than twenty years. In 1830 he moved to Edinburgh, where, or in its
neighbourhood, he resided for the rest of his long life, and where he
died in December 1859. He has given various autobiographic handlings of
this life--in the main it would seem quite trustworthy, but invested
with an air of fantastic unreality by his manner of relation.

His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of his
voluminous published work, have in all probability taken colour in the
general thought from his first literary work of any consequence, the
wonderful _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, which, with the
_Essays of Elia_, were the chief flowers of the _London Magazine_, and
appeared in that periodical during the year 1821. He had acquired this
habit during his sojourn at Oxford, and it had grown upon him during his
at first solitary residence at the Lakes to an enormous extent. Until he
thus committed the results of his dreams, or of his fancy and literary
genius working on his dreams, or of his fancy and genius by themselves,
to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth year, he had been, though a
great reader, hardly anything of a writer. But thenceforward, and
especially after, in 1825, he had visited his Lake neighbour Wilson at
Edinburgh, and had been by him introduced to _Blackwood_, he became a
frequent contributor to different magazines, and continued to be so,
writing far more even than he published, till his death. He wrote very
few books, the chief being a very free translation of a German novel,
forged as Scott's, and called _Walladmor_; a more original and stable,
though not very brilliant, ef