ferent light; and at his suggestion it was decided that if the boy wanted to ramble about for a while, he should have a guinea a week, with liberty to go where he chose.

From July to November he rambled from village to village in North Wales, living at good inns when he had money, and doing the best he could when he had none. Then an impulse seized him to go to London, without letting his friends know what had become of him. This involved the giving up of his guinea a week; but he believed that in London he could find money-lenders who would advance him a couple of hundred pounds upon his very considerable expectations. In his Confessions of an Opium-eater he has told of his experiences in London-perhaps somewhat idealized. But it is certain that he suffered extreme privations, was often upon the verge of actual starvation, and walked the streets night after night because he had no lodging-place. Some accident made his whereabouts known to his family and he was brought home. His guardians looked askance at his escapade. They would send him to Oxford, if he wished; but he should have an allowance of only £100 a year. To Worcester College, Oxford, he accordingly went in the autumn of 1803.

De Quincey's residence at Oxford continued nominally for about six years, though much of the latter period was passed in London. He was known as a quiet, studious young man. For some reason or other he did not present himself for examination for his degree of B.A. During the VOL. VIII.-5

latter part of this time, notwithstanding his small allowance, he was in possession of a good deal of money. Where it came from can only be conjectured; perhaps it may have come, in part at least, from his wealthy uncle, who certainly purchased an estate for De Quincey's mother, at a cost of £12,000; and from some circumstances it has been not improbably thought that he had transactions with money-lenders, converting the whole futurity of his inheritance into present cash. He had become acquainted with Coleridge, and learning that he was in great pecuniary distress, De Quincey went to the good Joseph Cottle of Bristol, and asked him to forward £500 to Coleridge, as coming from "a young man of fortune who admired his talents," and wanted to make him a present. Cottle induced him to reduce the sum to £300, which was sent to Coleridge. This was in the autumn of 1807.

In the autumn of 1809 Wordsworth, for whom De Quincey's admiration had been constantly increasing, removed from the little cottage at Grasmere to a larger one a mile distant. De Quincey, now in his twenty-fourth year, leased this cottage, which became his nominal home for the ensuing twenty-seven years. He kept up a bachelor's establishment for seven years, when he married Margaret Simpson, the beautiful and excellent daughter of a small farmer living near by. In his Autobiographic Sketches, written late in life, he gives some pictures of his life at Grasmere. One of the sketches relates to the year 1812:

DE QUINCEY AT TWENTY-EIGHT.

And what am I doing among the mountains? Taking opium? Yes, but what else? Why, reader, in 1812, the year we are now arrived at, as well as for some years previous, I have been chiefly studying German metaphysicians, or the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, etc. And how, and in what manner do I live? In short, what class or description of men do I belong to? I am at this period-viz., in 1812—living in a cottage; and with a single female servant (honi soit qui mal y pense), who amongst my neighbors passes by the name of my "housekeeper." And, as a scholar and a man of learned education, I may presume to class myself as an unworthy member of that indefinite body called gentlemen. Partly on the ground I have assigned, partly because, from having no visible calling or business, it is rightly judged that I must be living on my private fortune, I am so classed by my neighbors; and, by the courtesy of modern England, I am usually addressed on letters, etc., Esquire.

Am I married? Not yet. And I still take opium? On Saturday nights. And, perhaps, have taken it unblushingly ever since "the rainy Sunday," and "the stately Pantheon," and the "scientific druggist" of 1804? Even so. And how do I find my health after all this opium-taking? In short, how do I do? Why, pretty well, I thank you, reader. In fact, if I dared to say the real and simple truth (though, in order to satisfy the theories of some medical men, I ought to be ill), I was never better in my life than in the year 1812; and I hope sincerely that the quantity of claret, port, or "London particular Madeira," which, in all probability, you, good reader, have taken and design to take, for every term of eight years during your natural life, may as little disorder your health as mine was disordered by all the opium I had taken (though in quantity such that I might well have bathed and swum in it) for the eight years between 1804 and 1812.-Autobiographic Sketches.

The next sketch which we present relates to the

year 1816, very soon after the marriage of De Quincey:

DE QUINCEY AT TWO-AND-THIRTY.

Let there be a cottage standing in a valley eighteen miles from any town; no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters of a mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that all families resident within its circuit will comprise, as it were, one large household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or less interesting to your affections. Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3,000 and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, not (as a witty author has it) "a cottage with a double coach-house; " let it be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene) a white cottage, embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and clustering around the windows, through all the months of Spring, Summer, and Autumn, beginning, in fact, with May roses and ending with jasmine. Let it, however, not be Spring, nor Summer, nor Autumn, but Winter in its sternest shape.

But here, to save myself the trouble of too much verbal description, I will introduce a painter, and give him directions for the rest of the picture. Painters do not like white cottages, unless a good deal weatherstained; but as the reader now understands that it is a winter night, his services will not be required except for the inside of the house.

Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, in my family, the "drawing-room;" but being contrived "a double debt to pay," it is also, and more justly, termed "the library;" for it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbors. Of these I have about five thousand, collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can into this room. Make it populous with books; and furthermore paint me a good fire, and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of

a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table; and (as it is clear that no creature can come to see me on such a stormy night) place only two cups and saucers upon the tea-tray; and if you know how to paint such a thing, symbolically or otherwise, paint me an eternal teapot eternal a parte ante and a parte post; for I usually drink tea from eight o'clock at night to four in the morning. And as it is very unpleasant to make tea, or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a lovely young woman sitting at the table. Paint her arms like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's :-but no, dear M-! not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty, or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil.

Pass, then, my good painter, to something more within its power; and the next article brought forward should naturally be myself-a picture of the Opium-eater, with his "little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug" lying beside him on the table. As to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of that; you may paint it if you choose; but I apprise you that no "little" receptacle would, even in 1816, answer my purpose, who was at a distance from the "stately Pantheon" and all druggists (mortal or otherwise). No, you may as well paint the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and as much like a sublunary wine-decanter as possible. In fact, one day, by a series of happily conceived experiments, I discovered that it was a decanter. Into this you may put a quart of ruby-colored laudanum; that and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighborhood.Autobiographic Sketches.

De Quincey began the use of opium in 1804, he being then in his nineteenth year. He had come up from Oxford to London. For a week or two he had suffered from neuralgia, and a friend advised him to take laudanum to allay the intense pain; so one rainy Sunday he entered a druggist's