, tantalizing in proportion to the magnitude of their
design, and the beauty of their execution. Neglected and left alone as a
corpse in the shroud of his own genius, a fugitive, though not a
vagabond, compelled day after day to fight absolute starvation at the
point of his pen, the marvel is, that he has written so much which the
world may not willingly let die. _But_, it is the world's fault that the
writings it now recognizes, and may henceforth preserve on a high shelf,
are rather the sublime ravings of De Quincey drunk, than the calm,
profound cogitations of De Quincey sober. The theory of capital
punishments is much more subtle and widely ramified than we might at
first suppose. On what else are many of our summary critical and moral
judgments founded? Men find a man guilty of a crime--they vote him for
that one act a purely pernicious member of society, and they turn him
off. So a Byron quarrels with his wife--a Coleridge loses his balance,
and begins to reel and totter like Etna in an earthquake--a Burns, made
an exciseman, gradually descends toward the low level of his trade--or
a De Quincey takes to living on laudanum, and the public, instead of
seeking to reform and re-edify each brilliant begun ruin, shouts out,
"Raze, raze it to its foundation." Because the sun is eclipsed, they
would howl him away! Because one blot has lighted on an imperishable
page, they would burn it up! Let us hope, that as our age is fast
becoming ashamed of those infernal sacrifices called executions, so it
shall also soon forbear to make its most gifted sons pass through the
fire to Moloch, till it has tested their _thorough_ and _ineradicable_
vileness.

Mr. De Quincey's faults we have spoken of in the plural--we ought,
perhaps, rather to have used the singular number. In the one word
excitement, assuming the special form of opium--the "insane root"--lies
the _gravamen_ of his guilt, as, also, of Coleridge's. Now, we are far
from wishing to underrate the evil of this craving. But we ought to
estimate Mr. De Quincey's criminality with precision and justice; and,
while granting that he used opium to excess--an excess seldom
paralleled--we must take his own explanation of the circumstances which
led him to begin its use, and of the effects it produced on him. He did
not begin it to multiply or intensify his pleasures, still less to lash
himself with its fiery thongs into a counterfeit inspiration, but to
alleviate bodily pain. It beca