not to say anything unkind at all, but simply to give an account of the
thing "as it strikes" if not "a contemporary" yet a well-willing junior.
Take for instance the Malay incident. We know from De Quincey himself
that, within a few years, the truth of this famous story was questioned,
and that he was accused of having borrowed it from something of Hogg's.
He disclaimed this, no doubt truly. He protested that it was a
faithfully recorded incident: but though the events were then fresh, he
did not produce a single witness to prove that any Malay had been near
Grasmere at the time. And so elsewhere. As I have remarked about Borrow,
there are some people who have a knack of recounting truth so that it
looks as if it never had been true. I have been informed by Mr. James
Runciman that he himself once made considerable inquiries on the track
of _Lavengro_, and found that that remarkable book is, to some extent at
any rate, apparently historic. On the other hand I have been told by
another Borrovian who knew Borrow (which I never did) that the _Life of
Joseph Sell_ never existed. In such cases a critic can only go on
internal evidence, and I am sure that the vast majority of critics would
decide against most of De Quincey's stories on that. I do not suppose
that he ever, like Lamb, deliberately begat "lie-children": but
opium-eating is not absolutely repugnant to delusion, and literary
mystification was not so much the exception as the rule in his earlier
time. As to his "impenetrability," I can only throw myself on the
readers of such memoirs and reminiscences as have been published
respecting him. The almost unanimous verdict of his acquaintances and
critics has been that he was in a way mysterious, and though no doubt
this mystery did not extend to his children, it seems to have extended
to almost every one else. I gather from Mrs. Baird Smith's own remarks
that from first to last all who were concerned with him treated him as a
person unfit to be trusted with money, and while his habit of solitary
lodging is doubtless capable of a certain amount of explanation, it
cannot be described as other than curious. I had never intended to throw
doubt on his actual acquaintance with Lord Westport or Lady Carbery.
These persons or their representatives were alive when the
_Autobiography_ was published, and would no doubt have protested if De
Quincey had not spoken truly. But I must still hold that their total
disappearance from his