language was of any practical value. In our day De Quincey
would have been the greatest magazinist of the age, because his best
work was in the short essay; but it is to be feared that the
publishers of his time fattened on the good things which he produced
and gave small sums to the man who turned out these masterpieces with
so little effort.

De Quincey was born in 1785 and died in 1859. His life was peculiar
and its facts became very well known even in his own time because in
his _Autobiography_ and his _Confessions_ he disclosed its details
with the frankness of a child. These works are surcharged with some
exaggeration, but in the main they ring true. As precocious as
Macaulay, he had much of that author's fondness for books, and when he
first went to public school at eleven years of age he had read as much
as most men when they take a college degree. His mind absorbed
languages without effort. At fifteen he could write Greek verse, and
his tutor once remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob
better than you or I could address an English one."

He lost his father at the age of seven, and his mother seems to have
given little personal attention to him. He was in nominal charge of
four guardians, and at seventeen, when his health had been seriously
reduced by lack of exercise and overdosing of medicines, the sensitive
boy ran away from the Manchester Grammar school and wandered for
several months in Wales. He was allowed a pound a week by one of his
guardians, and he made shift with this for months; but finally the
hunger for books, which he had no money to buy, sent him to London.
There he undertook to get advances from money-lenders on his
expectations. This would have been easy, as he was left a substantial
income in his father's will, but these Shylocks kept the boy waiting.

In his _Confessions_ he tells of his sufferings from want of food, of
his nights in an unfurnished house in Soho with a little girl who was
the "slavey" of a disreputable lawyer, of his wanderings in the
streets, of the saving of his life by an outcast woman whom he has
immortalized in the most eloquent passages of the book. Finally, he
was restored to his friends and went to Oxford. His mental
independence prevented him from taking a degree, and chronic
neuralgia of the face and teeth led him to form the habit of taking
opium, which clung to him for life.

[Illustration: DE QUINCEY WITH TWO DAUGHTERS AND GRANDCHILD--FROM