03 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand drops of laudanum a
day. For several years after this he experienced the acutest misery, and
his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he succeeded in reducing
his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off his
torpor so as to become capable of literary work. {240} The most
impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the
unnatural expansion of space and time, and the infinite repetition of the
same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images; measureless
cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an endless
succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven, up which
toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden alarms,
hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and
light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's papers were
autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in these
reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for which,
perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of facts or
of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life seems to
have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted till the
reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque shadows of
them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this process is
described by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his
unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with the
keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception
displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope, Milton, Lessing,
Homer and the Homeridae_: his essay on _Style_; and his _Brief Appraisal
of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholarship is seen in his
articles on the _Toilet of a {241} Hebrew Lady_, and the _Casuistry of
Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on
_Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his narrative pieces the
most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_, describing the flight of
a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from Russia to the Chinese
frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which extended for four thousand
miles over desert steppes infested with foes; occupied six months' time,
and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon the way. The subje