De Quincey, Thomas

Thomas (1785-1859), an English essayist. His father, a wealthy Manchester merchant, died in 1792. Thomas was a shy, frail little fellow, fond of books; yet one summer he played the truant from school, put a volume of Greek into his pocket, and acted the vagrant in Wales and in London. At the Manchester Grammar School and at Oxford, he showed a genius for Latin and Greek, being regarded as little less than a prodigy. At fifteen he could converse in Greek fluently, yet he was a staunch advocate of the superiority of English literature. "We engage," he said, "to produce many scores of passages from Chaucer, not exceeding fifty to eighty lines, which contain more of picturesque simplicity, more tenderness, more fidelity to nature, more felicity of sentiment, more animation of narrative, and more truth of character than can be matched in all the Iliad or the Odyssey."

In 1809 he took possession of a cottage at Grasmere in the Lake District, where he became intimate with the Lake Poets. Here he married. He indulged in the use of laudanum, a habit originally acquired in connection with the rheumatic toothache. Here he read, struggled with his vice, and wrote essays for The London Magazine and Blackwood's of Edinburgh. His essays fill a dozen thick volumes. Young readers may begin with Revolt of a Tartar Tribe, The English Mail Coach, Joan of Arc, and Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

For so pleasing and prolific a writer De Quincey has left few sayings, but his whimsical way of writing is well shown in the following extract:

Any man who deals in murder must have very incorrect ways of thinking and truly inaccurate principles. . . . If once a man indulges him self in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

A great master of English composition; a critic of uncommon delicacy; an honest and unflinching investigator of received opinions; a philosophic inquirer, second only to his first and sole hero (Coleridge), De Quincey has left no successor to his rank. The exquisite finish of his style, with the scholastic rigor of his logic, form a combination which centuries may never reproduce, but which every generation should study as one of the marvels of English literature.--London Quarterly Review.

His charm, his merit, indeed, is not so much in the novelty of his thoughts as in the dazzling force of his rhetoric, his word-painting, his rhythm, his majestic swells and dying falls, which are to his bare ideas as autumn's gorgeous dyes to the landscape.--Welsh.