railings and called out: "A party in a parlor, all silent and all damned!"

Another time Coleridge said, "Charles, I think you have heard me preach?" "I n-n-never heard you do anything else," replied Lamb.

66 nor were

But Lamb's jokes, however excellent, are not, it must be remembered, the greater part of him. In his "uncomplaining endurance," says Barry Cornwall, "and in his steady adherence to a great principle of conduct, his life was heroic." "There was no fuss or cant about him," is one of Hazlitt's tributes; many his sweets or sours ever diluted with one particle of affectation." The world is coming to see that in doing no more than enjoy Lamb's puns and happy phrases it has done him scant justice; that his life was made sad by a tragic duty and sublime by his quiet, manly bearing of his burden.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

AFTER Coleridge and Lamb one may well be prepared for extremes of genius; but one finds, in following Thomas De Quincey, that one has not half guessed the vagaries which human nature can take. De Quincey, in fact, is the most various, the most elusive in character of all the great Romanticists; and it is only by coming to him with no preconceptions that one can possibly reconcile his intellectual power with his tendency to dreams, his strong will with his enslavement to an injurious habit, his shyness and solitude with his love of human society, and his minutely logical mind with his disorderly methods of life. As he himself said, "not to sympathize is not to understand."

On account of the sensational title of one of his books De Quincey has been too exclusively associated with opium-eating. With his use of the drug this narrative must deal later; here, however, it is important to notice that he was not a dreamer because he took opium, but, as Mr. Page, his chief biographer, has pointed out, he rather took opium the more readily because he was a dreamer, because he had what he himself called a "constitutional determination to reverie." Yet to call him merely an inspired dreamer is superficial and inadequate. He was, Coleridge not excepted, the most magnificent dreamer of a body of men given to great visions; but he was much more. He called himself " an intellectual creature," in both pursuits and pleasures, from his school-days; and this characteristic, intellectual force,

can never rightly be dissociated from any glimpse of him, whether in his dreams, in his humor, în his philosophy, or in the mere events of his life. Such an intellect, moreover, which could be the informing power of such emotional dreams, must have been intensely sympathetic; and one is not surprised, therefore, to learn. of his hatred of pedantry, his love of human beings, and, when his physical frailty is recognized, the almost immeasurable pain which he suffered.

In spite of De Quincey's remark concerning biography, that "one is so certain of the man's being born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under the necessity of reading it," the dates of his own birth and death are especially full of meaning; for he was born early enough to be a contemporary and friend of the great Romanticists, and yet lived, not in aged repose, but in active literary work, to be the contemporary and friend of Victorian writers; he was born before the French Revolution and he outlived the Crimean War; Carlyle, Ruskin, Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson were all famous years before his death. The exact date of his birth, which took place in Manchester, was August 15, 1785. He was the fifth child of Thomas Quincey, a merchant, and a Miss Penson. The family name had been English since the Conquest and was entitled to the prefix De, which the son adopted, writing it, however, with a small d.

Soon after the boy's birth the family lived at "The Farm," near Manchester, and in 1791 moved to Greenhay. Thus a great part of his childhood was spent in the country, his fondness for which was almost instinctive and lasted throughout his life. The earliest things he remembered were: "first, a remarkable dream of terrific

grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been constitutional and not dependent upon laudanum; and secondly, the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses." Before he was two he felt "the passion of grief," and soon afterwards "awe the most enduring, and a dawning sense of the infinite." Still more was he affected by the death of his sister Jane, though not so remarkably as by that of his sister Elizabeth when he was only five. He crept into the room where Elizabeth lay. From the gorgeous sunlight," he says, "I turned round to the corpse. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow the saddest that ever ear heard. It was a wind that might have swept the field of mortality for a thousand centuries." Not long afterwards the little fellow's father, dying of consumption, was brought home. How graphically he describes the first sight, indelible after years! "the sudden emerging of horses' heads from the deep gloom of the shady lane; the next was the mass of white pillows against which the dying patient was reclining." In no other writer is the record of childhood impressions more important; like Coleridge, he foreshadowed his manhood from his birth.

When he was eight De Quincey was sent to a dayschool at Salford, near by. He now came under the terrorizing dominion of an older brother. Fear and docility were uppermost. "What I was told to do I did, never presuming to murmur or to argue, or so much as to think about the nature of my orders. Doubtless, and

willingly I allow it, if those orders were to run away, I obeyed them more cheerfully." In his classes the boy made remarkable progress and soon showed himself an excellent scholar. For better opportunities he was sent in his eleventh year to Bath Grammar School. There he developed his great interest in Greek. "At thirteen," he says, "I wrote Greek with ease, and at fifteen my command of that language was so great, that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but would converse in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment. That boy,' said one of my masters, 'could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.'

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From Bath De Quincey went for a short time to Winkfield School in Wiltshire, which he left to make a trip to Ireland in 1800, with his friend Lord Westport. Of the various influences on his life at this time, that of a Miss Blake, for whom he felt a bashful admiration, was the strongest. "Ever after," he says, "throughout the period of youth, I was jealous of my own demeanor, reserved and awestruck in the presence of women; reverencing often, not so much them, as my own ideal of woman latent in them." The intellectual inspiration from Lady Carberry and the Rev. John Clowes, a clergyman in Manchester, were also of no small account in his early influences.

In 1801 De Quincey was sent, against his will, to Manchester Grammar School. He was already prepared for Oxford. A small, delicate boy, he positively shrank from the pugilistic pastimes of his fellows; and he felt no respect for his pedantic teacher. When July of the next year came round, therefore, he took the matter into his own hands and ran away. After his father's