A CHALK DRAWING BY JAMES ARCHER, R.S.A. MADE IN 1855.]

De Quincey was a close associate of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey,
Lamb and others. He was a brilliant talker, especially when stimulated
with opium, but he was incapable of sustained intellectual work. Hence
all his essays and other work first appeared in periodicals and were
then published in book form. It is noteworthy that an American
publisher was the first to gather his essays in book form, and that
his first appreciation, like that of Carlyle, came from this country.

Much of De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with
political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an
expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he
has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in
the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay
he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment,
and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's
essay on the origin of roast pig.

De Quincey's fame, however, rests upon _The Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater_. This is a record unique in English literature. It tells
in De Quincey's usual style, with many tedious digressions, the story
of his neglected boyhood, his revolt at school discipline and monotony
that had shattered his health, his wanderings in Wales, his life as a
common vagrant in London, his college life, his introduction to opium
and the dreams that came with indulgence in the drug. The gorgeous
beauty of De Quincey's pictures of these opium visions has probably
induced many susceptible readers to make a trial of the drug, with
deep disappointment as the result. No common mind can hope to have
such visions as De Quincey records.

His imagination has well been called Druidic; it played about the
great facts and personages of history and it invested these with a
background of the most solemn and imposing natural features. These
dreams came to have with him the very semblance of reality. Read the
terrible passages in the _Confessions_ in which the Malay figures;
read the dream fugues in "Suspira," the visions seen by the boy when
he looked on his dead sister's face, or the noble passages that
picture the three Ladies of Sorrow. Here is a passage on the vision of
eternity at his sister's death bier, which gives a good idea of De
Quincey's style:

Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow--