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PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN RITCHIE FINDLAY 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 ADAM & CHARLES BLACK 
 
 1886 
 
■ 
 ■ 
 
 * • 
 - • • * 
 
 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Bust of De Quincey by Sir John Steell, 
 R.S.A. . . . • Fro7itispiece 
 
 Medallion by Shakespeare Wood 
 
 Title-page 
 
 Chalk Drawing by James Archer, R.S.A. 
 
 Page i 
 
 15 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Some explanation of the origin of this little 
 volume may be expected and permitted. 
 
 An elegant edition of the Confessions of 
 an English Opium-Eater has lately appeared, 1 
 to which are appended some interesting notes 
 of conversations with De Quincey from the 
 pen of a Mr. Richard Woodhouse, barrister 
 of the Temple, a young man of literary tastes, 
 who, says Mr. Garnett, "himself wrote no- 
 thing for publication, but mingled with the 
 brilliant literary circle which, about the year 
 1820, gathered round Messrs. Taylor and 
 Hessey, publishers of the London Magazine, 
 in which the Confessions originally appeared." 
 
 1 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Edited 
 by Richard Garnett. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, 
 and Co. 1885. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The perusal of these notes induced me to 
 turn to notes which I myself had taken of 
 conversations held with De Quincey thirty 
 years later. I do not profess — indeed I 
 desire explicitly to disclaim — the art and 
 practice of note-taking of this kind : an art 
 and practice which the late Mr. Nassau Senior, 
 for example, carried to the utmost stretch 
 and perfection. Though I have had the 
 honour and pleasure of knowing and talking 
 familiarly with many men of considerable dis- 
 tinction in letters and in public life, the desire 
 to record such intercourse never overcame 
 me save in this one instance. This of itself 
 may be taken as a humble testimony to the 
 singularly attractive and impressive character 
 of De Quincey's talk. The notes were 
 taken at the time merely and solely for 
 the refreshment of my own memory ; if it 
 ever afterwards occurred to me that they 
 might be of other use, I always felt that 
 they could be so used only after a consider- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 able lapse of years. With the lapse of thirty 
 years or thereby reasons against publication 
 have lapsed likewise, and there now seems to 
 me nothing to prevent those scanty jottings 
 being given to the world of De Quincey's 
 admirers, to be taken for what they are 
 worth. 
 
 The notes extend over a period of seven 
 years — 1852-59 — the last years of De Quin- 
 cey's life. They were mere memoranda 
 pencilled on scraps of paper, sufficient to 
 refresh an originally vivid and retentive 
 memory, until, fearing its failure to keep 
 hold of connecting links, I found leisure 
 fifteen years ago to put the scraps into shape 
 and write them out clearly and fully. In this 
 state they have been seen and read over by 
 one or two of my friends who knew and 
 admired De Quincey ; I think only by John 
 Hill Burton, Alexander Russel, and John 
 Brown — all now, alas ! no more. I have 
 recently felt it my duty to submit them to 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Mr. De Quincey's surviving daughters, and 
 their approval to the present publication has 
 been most heartily accorded. 
 
 The notes appear here, with one or two 
 trivial excisions, exactly as they were written 
 out in 1870; I have thought it better to 
 relegate to the foot of the page anything like 
 explanation or addition. 
 
 J. R. FINDLAY. 
 
 1885. 
 
... I .1 
 
PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 
 
 TV /TY friend Mr. John Hill Burton had 
 often promised to introduce me to 
 Mr. De Quincey, knowing that I took great 
 interest in his writings, although at that 
 time I was acquainted with them mainly 
 through such stray articles as I had read in 
 magazines. 
 
 On the ioth January 1852 Mr. Burton 
 and I walked out to where Mr. De Quincey 
 was residing, with his three daughters, in 
 a cottage at Mavisbank, a sort of upper 
 suburb of Lasswade. We were received 
 by Miss De Quincey and Miss Florence. 1 
 
 1 Miss De Quincey (Margaret) married in 1853 
 B 
 
2 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 * i « ; m 
 
 ' . '.,- Before' £e^<::hing the house Mr. Burton had 
 
 ■ • r . ,- warned .me that* it was twenty chances to 
 •*• • * • i • • C • „• • - .' 
 * '*« •* ■ '©ne- whether* w,e would see De Quincey, as 
 
 he was very shy of strangers, or visitors 
 
 of any sort, and that I might consider it 
 
 a great favour if he made his appearance. 
 
 Miss Florence ascertained that her father 
 
 was visible, and in a very few minutes he 
 
 entered the room — a man, once seen, never 
 
 to be forgotten. His appearance has been 
 
 often described, but generally, I think, with 
 
 a touch of caricature. 1 He was a very little 
 
 Mr. Robert Craig, who settled as a farmer in 
 Tipperary. She died in 1871, leaving one son, now 
 a captain in the Royal Artillery, and a daughter, now 
 married. Florence married in 1855 Colonel Baird 
 Smith, R. E., who died in 186 1, leaving two daughters. 
 Emily, the third daughter, I did not have the pleasure 
 of seeing till a subsequent visit. See Appendix A. 
 
 1 The "Thomas Papaverius " description in The 
 Book Hunter, the best known — and the best — of 
 these, certainly errs on this side. It recalls the 
 features, the complexion, the expression and aspect 
 of its subject much as vigorous and highly-coloured 
 caricature portraits — in Vanity Fair, for example — 
 recall noble and honoured faces and figures. We 
 acknowledge and smile at the likeness, with a secret 
 grudge at the perverted power of the limner. 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. 
 
 man (about 5 feet 3 or 4 inches) ; his 
 countenance the most remarkable for its 
 intellectual attractiveness that I have ever 
 seen. His features, though not regular, 
 were aristocratically fine, and an air of 
 delicate breeding pervaded the face. His 
 forehead was unusually high, square, and 
 compact. 1 At first sight his face appeared 
 boyishly fresh and smooth, with a sort of 
 hectic glow upon it that contrasted remark- 
 ably with the evident appearances of age 
 in the grizzled hair and dim-looking eyes. 
 The flush or bloom on the cheeks was, I 
 have no doubt, an effect of his constant use 
 of opium ; and the apparent smoothness of 
 the face disappeared upon examination. The 
 best description of his peculiar appearance 
 in this respect is one given by Sir Walter 
 Scott in reference to General Platoff, whom 
 Scott met at Paris, and from whom, he tells 
 
 1 As the hair got thinner on the upper part of the 
 head the brow assumed a more arched aspect, as seen 
 in Mr. Archer's drawing, which gives a very good 
 idea of De Quincey's ordinary appearance in his 
 later years — a familiar rather than an intellectual 
 version, however. 
 
4 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 us, he took his portrait of Mr. Touchwood 
 in St. Rona?is Well. " His face, which at 
 the distance of a yard or two seemed hale 
 and smooth, appeared, when closely ex- 
 amined, to be seamed with a million of 
 wrinkles crossing each other in every direc- 
 tion possible, but as fine as if drawn by the 
 point of a very fine needle." Mr. De 
 Quincey's eyes were dark in colour, 1 the iris 
 large, but with a strange flatness and dimness 
 of aspect, which, however, did not indicate 
 any deficiency of sight. So far as I ever 
 observed he saw distant objects tolerably 
 well, and almost to the very end of his life 
 he could read the smallest print without 
 spectacles. I remember on one occasion he 
 talked about George Gilfillan's pen-and-ink 
 portrait of himself, in which the Reverend 
 George spoke disparagingly of his eyes, de- 
 claring that De Quincey never looked people 
 straight in the face. He resented keenly 
 the imputation that he had anything ap- 
 proaching to a squint, still more keenly, in 
 
 1 The Scotch word "blae" would best express the 
 shade. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 
 
 his own humorous style, the insinuation, 
 which he declared George intended, that he 
 had also a " moral squint." He had cer- 
 tainly neither the one nor the other; he 
 looked quite straightforward at one ; but it 
 was often difficult to catch his eyes from the 
 hazy expression diffused over them. They 
 had the dreamy look often observable in 
 students or in short-sighted people. 1 
 
 No one who ever met De Quincey could 
 
 1 Persons suffering from such weakness of eyesight 
 are liable to be accused of declining to look an inter- 
 locutor fully in the face, simply because their doing so 
 involves a painful strain on their eyes in the attempt 
 to adjust the focus to the distance between the 
 speakers, especially if one eye be weaker than the 
 other. This seems to have been De Quincey's 
 case ; but Gilfillan's description, which appeared 
 originally, I think, in Tail's Magazine, and was 
 reprinted in his Gallery of Literary Portraits ■, 1845, 
 goes further than this. He says : " His eyes, they 
 sparkle not, they shine not, they are lustreless : can 
 that be a squint which glances over from them towards 
 you ? No. It is only a slight habit one of them has 
 of occasionally looking in a different direction from 
 the other ; there is nothing else particular about them ; 
 there is not even the glare which lights up sometimes 
 dull eyes into eloquence." 
 
6 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 fail to be struck, after even the briefest in- 
 tercourse, with the extreme sweetness and 
 courtesy of his manners. He had the air 
 of old-fashioned good manners of the highest 
 kind; natural and studied politeness, free 
 from the slightest ostentation or parade ; a 
 delicacy, gentleness, and elegance of demean- 
 our that at once conciliated and charmed. 
 As Mr. Burton was well acquainted with the 
 family, and had much to say to the young 
 ladies, De Quincey and I were left for the 
 most part to carry on a sort of side conver- 
 sation between ourselves, a position which 
 at first I found sufficiently embarrassing. 
 Here I was, a novice, set face to face with 
 one of the greatest masters of conversation 
 — of a special kind of it at least — of his day, 
 with the talk drifting about to all sorts of sub- 
 jects, for none seemed to come amiss to him. 
 In any attempt to transcribe, or rather de- 
 scribe, his conversation, the chief difficulty 
 would be to fix — perhaps to account for — a 
 certain evanescent charm which every one 
 felt, but which can be only remembered, 
 not transmitted. It was in fact an exquisite 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 
 
 and transient emanation from the intellectual 
 and moral nature of the man, enhanced in 
 its effect by the rare beauty of his language, 
 and the perfectly elegant construction of 
 every phrase and sentence that he uttered. 
 The comparison which the American poet 
 and critic and diplomatist, Mr. James Russell 
 Lowell, makes of good style to good breeding 
 is admirably applicable alike to De Quincey's 
 literary style and to his personal manner. 
 Lowell speaks of " that exquisite something 
 called style, which, like the grace of perfect 
 breeding, everywhere persuasive and nowhere 
 emphatic, makes itself felt by the skill with 
 which it effaces itself, and masters us at last 
 with a sense of indefinable completeness." He 
 did not quite, as Burton had told me he would 
 do, talk magazine articles, but the literary 
 habit was notable, though not in the least 
 obtrusive, in all his talk. One effect of this 
 was somewhat trying to an inexperienced lis- 
 tener, for when in the flow of his conversation 
 he came to the close of one of his beautifully 
 rounded and balanced paragraphs, he would 
 pause in order to allow you to have your 
 
 
8 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 say, with the result sometimes of rather tak- 
 ing one aback, especially as the subject of 
 conversation often seemed to have been 
 brought, by his conduct of it, to its complete 
 and legitimate conclusion. The listener was 
 apt to feel that he had perorated rather than 
 paused. In his mode of conversing, as in 
 everything else, his courtesy of manner was 
 observable. He never monopolised talk, 
 allowed every one to have a fair chance, 
 and listened with respectful patience to the 
 most commonplace remarks from any one 
 present. The fact that any one was, for the 
 time, a member of the company in which 
 he also happened to be, evidently in his 
 eyes entitled the speaker to all consideration 
 and respect. But he had a just horror of 
 bores, and carefully avoided them. We 
 talked, among many other things, about 
 Macaulay, and about his prodigious power 
 and love of talk. De Quincey remarked 
 that such passion for speaking was usually 
 the sign of a weak and shallow mind, but 
 that Macaulay was a remarkable exception 
 to this rule — that he was the only man of 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. 
 
 real power and substantial acquirements of 
 whom he had ever heard, who was possessed 
 by " an actual incontinence of talk." Even 
 Coleridge, regarded as the greatest talker cf 
 the day, would not always talk, whilst Mac- 
 aulay seemed ready to pour forth a flood of 
 disquisition and information at any given 
 time. With Coleridge there was always one 
 difficulty, and sometimes two. It was some- 
 times a great difficulty to get him to begin 
 to talk ; it was always so to get him to stop. 
 On our leaving, Mr. De Quincey accom- 
 panied us to the door, and whilst he was 
 standing in the little garden-plot in front of 
 the house I observed that his feet had been 
 thrust stockingless into an old pair of slippers. 
 And here he was, a man of sixty-three years 
 of age, and apparently of extreme feeble- 
 ness, thus standing bareheaded in the 
 raw air of a January afternoon. We re- 
 marked that he would catch cold, and were 
 hurrying away, but he begged us not to 
 be the least uneasy on his account, for he 
 never did take cold ; it was one of the 
 many advantages of opium that it pre- 
 
 c 
 
io PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 served him against all such trivial accidents. 
 His dress, to an allusion to which I have 
 thus been drawn incidentally, was at all 
 times peculiar. His clothes had generally 
 a look of extreme age, and also of having 
 been made for a person somewhat larger than 
 himself. I believe the real cause of this was 
 that he had sot much thinner in those later 
 years ; whilst he wore, and did wear, I 
 suppose till the end of his life, the clothes 
 that had been made for him years before. I 
 have sometimes seen appearances about 
 him of a shirt and shirt-collar, but usually 
 there were no indications of these articles 
 of dress. When I came to visit him in 
 his lodgings, I saw him in all stages of 
 costume ; sometimes he would come in to 
 me from his bedroom to his parlour, as on 
 this occasion, with' shoes, but no stockings, 
 and sometimes with stockings, but no shoes. 
 When in bed, where I also saw him from 
 time to time, he wore a large jacket — not 
 exactly an under-jacket, but a jacket made 
 in the form of a coat, of white flannel ; some- 
 thing like a cricketer's coat in fact. In the 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. n 
 
 street his appearance was equally singular. 
 He walked with considerable rapidity (he 
 said walking was the only athletic exercise 
 in which he had ever excelled) and with 
 an odd one-sided, and yet straightforward, 
 motion, moving his legs only, and neither his 
 arms, head, nor any other part of his body — 
 like Wordsworth's cloud — 
 
 "Moving altogether, if he moved at all." 
 
 His hat, which had the antediluvian aspect 
 characteristic of the rest of his clothes, was 
 generally stuck on the back of his head, and 
 no one w r ho ever met that antiquated figure, 
 with that strangely dreamy and intellectual 
 face, working its way rapidly, and with an 
 oddly deferential air, through any of the 
 streets of Edinburgh — a sight certainly by no 
 means common, for he was very seldom to 
 be seen in town — could ever forget it. 1 He 
 was very fond of walking, but generally his 
 walks were merely into town to his publisher's 
 
 1 See Mrs. Baird Smith's description of her father's 
 mode of dressing, p. 361, vol. i., of {Thomas de 
 Quincey : his Life and Writings. By H. A. Page. 
 Two vols. London, 1877. 
 
 
12 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 office (Mr. Hogg's, then in Nicolson Street) 
 and back again to Lasswade. Till he was 
 nearly seventy he took this walk — one of 
 twelve miles — without inconvenience. 
 
 At this introductory meeting at Lasswade 
 it was arranged by Miss De Quincey that 
 Mr. Burton and I should come out to dinner 
 ten days afterwards, and on Monday, 19th 
 January, we again walked out. The family 
 party was on this occasion augmented by his 
 third daughter, Miss Emily, but Mr. Burton 
 and I were the only strangers. At dinner 
 we talked on ordinary topics, in which small 
 and table talk De Quincey was always as 
 ready to join as in the most abstruse discus- 
 sion. He took an interest in, and kept him- 
 self up with, all the current topics of the day ; 
 knew the latest accident and incident reported 
 in the newspapers, as well as the minutest 
 occurrences recorded in the lives of distin- 
 guished characters of past generations. 1 When 
 1 He read the newspapers sedulously ; and Dr. 
 Warburton Begbie, in his notes on De Quincey's 
 last illness, says: "Whether seated in his chair or 
 lying in bed, I equally found him attempting to read 
 without spectacles, which he never employed. The 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 13 
 
 the ladies left, Burton and De Quincey got 
 upon talk about old authors, and on questions 
 of history and classics that were beyond my 
 depth ; so that sometimes for considerable 
 intervals I was left stranded on the shore, 
 with this double tide of erudition and 
 speculation ebbing and flowing before me. 
 Among other things we had some conver- 
 sation about ecclesiastical matters — about 
 the habit that every ecclesiastical set, every 
 church or corporation, has of abusing and 
 denouncing its rivals, and of the ingenuity 
 with which each could fasten upon the 
 other Scriptural symptoms of reprobation. 
 De Quincey remarked that this was really 
 not a difficult matter. " I think," said he, 
 " it would be a very easy task for any one 
 
 Scotsman, if not in his hands, was very near him, and 
 he highly prized it, styling it a wonderful newspaper, 
 exhibiting a versatility of political, chiefly, but of 
 varied talent, such as, he believed, had never been 
 surpassed." As this passage is omitted from the 
 version of Dr. Begbie's notes given by Mr. Page 
 (see Life, vol. ii. p. 295), I have a natural and, I 
 hope, excusable, pride in printing it here from the 
 original manuscript. 
 
i 4 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 possessed of ordinary powers of research, and 
 some knowledge of the great Antichrist con- 
 troversy, by the exercise of moderate ingenuity 
 to fix down all the marks of Antichrist — of 
 course you don't for a moment suppose that I 
 in the slightest degree believe in the popular 
 notion and theory of Antichrist — but certainly 
 all the popular signs and characteristics of 
 Antichrist might be very readily fixed down 
 upon the Presbyterian Church of Scotland." 
 The placidity of manner and tone with which 
 he enunciated this, and other startling proposi- 
 tions, corresponded well with the description 
 which Bayle gives of an eccentric philoso- 
 pher who was burnt in Paris in 1573, for 
 " privately dogmatising upon Atheism," and 
 who, says Bayle, " although he maintained 
 his heterodox opinions until death, always 
 pronounced them with a sweetness and 
 gentleness of manner, and from a mouth 
 made up for the delivery of the most refined 
 phraseology." We had some speculation as 
 to the terrific denunciations which would 
 follow the publication of a treatise on this 
 subject, and in this tone, from a man able 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 
 
 to exercise such perverse ingenuity as he 
 described — none better fitted to do so, as 
 I ventured to hint, than himself. Once, 
 after some pause in the conversation, De 
 Quincey and Burton began to talk at the 
 same moment. Burton, of course, at once 
 gave way. This, however, De Quincey would 
 not permit, and after a prolonged struggle in 
 politeness De Quincey carried his point by 
 bargaining that, when Burton had said his 
 say, he would be prepared to follow with the 
 remark he had been stopped in making. 
 Burton having accordingly at some length de- 
 livered himself, asked De Quincey to take his 
 turn. But by this time oblivion had covered 
 up what he had intended to say, leading him to 
 indulge in a humorous lamentation over his 
 lost idea, regarding which he said all that he 
 could be certain was, that it was unquestion- 
 ably a brilliant and original one, which might 
 have shed light upon some of the great ques- 
 tions that perplex the world ; though now, to 
 the lasting loss of humanity, the spark had 
 gone out for ever. 
 
 In the course of the evening a curious 
 
16 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 episode occurred. The perfect quiet of the 
 rural roadway or lane was suddenly broken 
 by the sound of children's voices singing. 
 The whole household went to the door, and 
 found in the little garden plot a party of 
 "guisers," who, their song finished, were sent 
 away with some small gratuity. Whilst the 
 little group, including the ladies and the 
 maid-servants, were gathered in the doorway 
 looking at and listening to the children 
 singing, De Quincey stood silent, and appeared 
 to have lapsed into a sort of dream, which 
 abstracted state continued for a few minutes 
 after our return to the dining-room. He 
 had evidently misunderstood^ the character 
 of his visitors, and instead of rightly regarding 
 them as village children on an evening frolic, 
 fancied that they w r ere in actual distress, 
 and making a somewhat peculiar and more 
 than usually clamorous appeal for charity. 
 Silence was strikingly broken by his exclaim- 
 ing, " All that I have ever had enjoyment of 
 in life, the charms of friendship, the smiles 
 of women, and the joys of wine, seem to 
 rise up to reproach me for my happiness 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. 17 
 
 when I see such miser} 7 , and think there is 
 so much of it in the world." 
 
 After we had rejoined the ladies, in talking 
 about our having to walk home in the dark, 
 there were some jokes about the possibility 
 of our being attacked and garrotted. We 
 both remarked that we would be poor sub- 
 jects of plunder, when De Quincey said that 
 we would certainly not be such profitable 
 subjects as a young gentleman whom his son 
 had lately brought out to visit them, and 
 whom they had made very uneasy on the 
 score of the risks he ran. He was covered, 
 De Quincey said, with magnificent jewellery 
 — hung over with chains, rings, breastpins, 
 etc. De Quincey speculated upon the 
 pleased surprise with which any party of 
 garrotters would regard the capture and 
 plunder of such a gilded youth. They 
 would have rejoiced, he said, as did the 
 pirates of old when they came across, not 
 an ordinary prize, but a Spanish galleon. 
 The young ladies played overtures and 
 other pieces on the piano, one of which De 
 Quincey particularly praised, saying that it 
 
 D 
 
i8 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 soothed him like a delicious anodyne. Miss 
 Florence remarked that it was a poor com- 
 pliment to the music to say that it set him 
 to sleep. He explained to her, with bur- 
 lesque excess of particularity and politeness 
 — the humour of which he himself evidently 
 enjoyed as keenly as the amused auditors — 
 that it was really the highest compliment he 
 could pay to it, for he meant that the music 
 was giving the greatest spiritual gratification, 
 and being to him, for the time, the highest 
 good, as making him, usually so miserable, 
 temporarily happy; and therefore fulfilling 
 its purpose, though not, perhaps, in the 
 ordinary way or according to rule. 
 
 On our leaving, Mr. De Quincey, though 
 the night was dark and the road tortuous, 
 insisted upon accompanying us to Loanhead, 
 in order that he might show me the ultimate 
 point to which the Lasswade coach would 
 carry me in the direction of his house, " when 
 next I did him the honour to come out to 
 see him." On the way I asked him if he 
 ever visited his old friend Professor Wilson, 
 who was at that time residing in bad health 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 19 
 
 with his brother in Dalkeith. He said he 
 had not. His reason for not going to see 
 him was, he said, that he understood Wilson, 
 from the nervous condition of mind into 
 which he had fallen, did not care to see 
 visitors ; was not, indeed, able to receive 
 them. " I have, however, intended for a 
 considerable time to write to him. I have 
 not yet accomplished my purpose, but I 
 shall probably make it out to-morrow." 
 He continued, " The misfortune of the case, 
 and the consideration which retards me 
 from writing, is that I have two motives 
 for doing so — one an interested motive, 
 the other a disinterested one. And when 
 these two go together, the former, like 
 Pharaoh's lean kine, swallows up the latter, 
 entirely annihilates it, and leaves only the 
 interested one standing in its native and 
 loathsome leanness. I have, you will believe 
 me, the most sincere desire to ask after my 
 old friend John Wilson's welfare, but years 
 ago he did me a service which I in some 
 sort now require to have renewed. The cir- 
 cumstances were that, among many wander- 
 
20 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 ings, I had settled for some time in Glasgow. 
 I had left there a number of books and 
 manuscripts of some value to myself, al- 
 though not perhaps of very much to any 
 other person. Subsequently, when residing 
 in Edinburgh, I wished to place those articles 
 out of the risks of such accidents as arrest- 
 ments and the like. Being acquainted with 
 no one in Glasgow who could aid me in 
 such a difficulty, and knowing Wilson's con- 
 nection with the west of Scotland, I naturally 
 applied to him, and received from him a letter 
 of introduction to a Glasgow bookseller. On 
 presenting the letter this gentleman expressed 
 in the strongest terms his willingness to do 
 anything whatever to oblige his friend Wilson. 
 Of course, reinforced by such aid, I felt 
 as if I had come into the possession of 
 Aladdin's lamp, Wilson's friend being the 
 genius who, thus called up, was ready to re- 
 lieve me from all my troubles — a man who 
 said to his servants, Come, and he cometh ; 
 go, and he goeth ; do this, and he doeth it ; 
 and who furnished me with all the necessary 
 means for recovering and transporting the 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. 
 
 books and manuscripts. They were deposited 
 in safety, and I returned home in triumph. 
 This was some years ago, and my present 
 dilemma is, that I have totally forgotten not 
 only the name of the street and the appear- 
 ance of the place in which they were de- 
 posited, but also the name and address of 
 the gentleman to whom "Wilson gave me the 
 introduction. My unfortunate chattels, there- 
 fore, instead of being rescued from destruc- 
 tion, are plunged into a deeper and more 
 hopeless oblivion than ever. This, you will 
 see, is what I want to know from Wilson, 
 not, of course, where the books are placed, 
 but the name of the gentleman to whom he 
 introduced me, and I shall certainly write to 
 him one of these days.'"' 1 
 
 1 Those are no doubt the papers afterwards restored 
 to him by the ingenious intervention of Mr. Hogg : 
 see Page, vol. ii. p. 8. My memory even now (1SS5) 
 retains assurance that in this case I report almost 
 word for word De Quincey's phrases. I do not know 
 that in all cases where I have in like manner reported 
 him I could be quite so certain, but must be content, 
 like Mr. "Woodhouse, to give the substance of what 
 he said "somewhat in his own manner," with the 
 view of affording ' ' some idea of the general tenor of 
 
22 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 On another evening (ioth November 1853) 
 on which I went to Lasswade again with Mr. 
 Burton, Mr. R. M. Craig, who soon after 
 married Miss De Quincey, was of the party ; 
 and this was the only occasion of the many 
 times I saw De Quincey, at all hours and 
 under varied circumstances, on which he did 
 not shine- — that is to say, he was languid and 
 dull. He was probably suffering from mental 
 stress and want of sleep, or possibly from the 
 reaction supervening on one of his terms of 
 extra addiction to opium. We had little talk 
 with him during dinner, and he made almost 
 no effort to join in, or keep up the conversation. 
 In the evening, however, he brightened up a 
 bit, and we had some good discussion about 
 Dr. Johnson. Johnson's contradictoriness, 
 
 his conversation, and of the richness of his mind, and 
 of the facility with which he brings in the stores of his 
 reading and reflection to bear upon the ordinary topics 
 of conversation." But I feel, as Mr. Woodhouse says 
 he did, "that it can convey no adequate impression 
 [either of those qualities, I may add] or of the 
 eloquence and scope of his language." Those feli- 
 cities were indeed too delicate and transient to be so 
 caught and transmitted. 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. 23 
 
 and his remarkable want of knowledge of, or 
 adherence to, first principles, were strongly 
 dwelt upon by De Quincey. The only writ- 
 ings of Johnson's which seemed to him to 
 indicate any appreciation and hold of first 
 principles were the law papers which he drew 
 up for Boswell. Johnson evidently did not 
 appreciate, did not comprehend, the high 
 philosophic powers of Burke for example ; 
 even as such powers were indicated in Burke's 
 Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, a sub- 
 ject that would naturally interest Johnson. 
 
 Talking about the Scotch accent and 
 language, and remarking how pleasant a dia- 
 lect Scotch was if spoken without vulgarity 
 on the one hand or affectation on the other, 
 I instanced Lord Cockburn as one of the 
 best speakers of Scotch that I ever heard. 
 De Quincey demurred a little, on the ground 
 that Cockburn prided himself rather too much 
 upon it, and that there was in his Scotch the 
 slightest shade of that affectation which had 
 been deprecated. Remarking on the light 
 in which the Scotch tongue was regarded by 
 the English, I complained of the unconcealed 
 
24 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 contempt with which the vulgar English re- 
 garded any indication of Scotch pronuncia- 
 tion, and expressed a fear that the same dis- 
 like extended pretty well up in society. This 
 De Quincey and Miss Florence vehemently 
 denied, maintaining that in good English 
 society they never heard the speaking of 
 Scotch, unless it were obviously tainted with 
 vulgarity, remarked on otherwise than as giv- 
 ing additional interest to the person using it. 
 On Sunday, 25th June 1854, in the course 
 of a walk I met De Quincey at the Dean 
 Bridge at the close of the afternoon service. 
 He told me that he was staying in town, and 
 that he had taken advantage of the quiet of 
 the Sunday afternoon for a walk, but that he 
 unfortunately miscalculated his time, and, 
 seeking for solitude, had found himself in the 
 midst of a crowd of gay and fashionable 
 people returning from church, or walking 
 after church. With his usual politeness he 
 insisted upon walking back towards town 
 with me, in spite of the crowds. He did so 
 to the west end of Princes Street. I returned 
 again with him to the end of the Dean Bridge. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 
 
 He insisted upon going back with me ; and 
 so we walked back and forward five or six 
 times. He began conversation by telling me 
 that he was extremely desirous of sending to 
 one of my sisters — who were by this time ac- 
 quainted with him and his daughters — a copy 
 of the newly published third volume of his 
 works. 1 He had been unable, however, he 
 said, to ascertain whether we spelt the name 
 Findlay with or without a "d," and that this 
 " d " difficulty had prevented him inscribing, 
 as he intended to do, the volume ; for of all 
 the petty breaches of good manners that he 
 desired most to avoid, was that of either mis- 
 calling or mis-spelling any one's name. He 
 considered it unpardonable in the case of 
 any one with whom you have any pretension 
 to acquaintanceship ; and his want of precise 
 knowledge had proved an insuperable obstacle 
 to his carrying out the intention referred to. 
 He had consulted his publisher on the point, 
 but he could not give him any certain or 
 trustworthy information. He had not sup- 
 posed, he said, that young ladies would 
 
 1 Selections : Grave and Gay, etc. Hogg. 
 E 
 
26 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 be at all interested in the biographical 
 portion of his book, of which the two first 
 volumes mainly consisted, but the third, 
 being more of a narrative, might, he thought, 
 amuse them. I told him that they had 
 read all the three with great interest, but 
 that, nevertheless, they would attach a high 
 value to his proposed present ; which, of 
 course, never came. 1 He explained that he 
 had left Lasswade partly to be near books 
 and libraries to complete his fourth volume 
 more conveniently, but partly also for change, 
 and from a desire which perpetually haunted 
 him to fly from himself. " I often," he said, 
 " feel an almost irresistible inclination to rush 
 away and bury myself among books in the 
 
 1 This arose, I believe, from real incapacity to carry 
 out his intentions in such matters ; a sort of paralysis 
 of the will suspending the action that ought to have 
 followed the intent — a condition all nervous people 
 can more or less understand, as being so far subject 
 to it themselves. It is aggravated by anything like a 
 dilemma or a choice of courses ; in those cases the 
 impulse, faint enough perhaps to carry action into one 
 course, gets hopelessly dissipated in the contemplation 
 of more than one ; though I suspect that De Quincey 
 rather enjoyed being subject to such dilemmas. 
 
THOMAS DE QITXCEY. 27 
 
 heart of some great city like London or 
 Paris." I asked for his daughters. He said 
 he had not seen nor heard of them since he 
 left Lasswade, some three weeks before. He 
 never wrote letters, and did not wish to re- 
 ceive any ; therefore he had no means of 
 knowing how they were, unless he walked 
 out to ask for them, which he intended to do 
 very soon. Passing across the Dean Bridge, 
 he remarked upon the peculiar beauty of the 
 view — the mixed elements in it, the noble 
 city view, imposing mansions on the one side, 
 and trees, hills', and the sea in the distance, 
 and yet apparently in immediate proximity. 
 It was a rus in itrbe, or, more properly, it 
 was a town in the country. Once, in walk- 
 ing with him in moonlight on George IV. 
 Bridge, before it was so much built up as it 
 is now, he spoke enthusiastically of the dark 
 masses on the west side of the Bridge, 
 crowned by the broken bulk of the castle 
 with all its romantic associations. 1 
 
 1 This moonlight walk arose out of a highly char- 
 acteristic trait. He had dined with me at George 
 Square ; he preferred an early hour, and our small 
 
28 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 We got, somehow or other, into a sort 
 of sad, and almost too personal, mood of 
 converse, in the course of which he spoke 
 
 party had sat down to dinner at five or six o'clock. 
 The two or three guests, all equally fascinated and 
 delighted with his talk — only my uncle, 1 Russel, and 
 Burton probably — had left us one by one : my uncle 
 for the country, where he was staying, I inhabiting 
 alone his house in town ; Burton, unceremoniously 
 enough when he thought fit to go ; and at last Russel, 
 about eleven o'clock, he having his work at the Scots- 
 man office for next morning's paper, as I had also. 
 After fully an hour more had slipped away I was 
 obliged to tell De Quincey that I too must go. Then 
 came elegant apologies, undoubtedly sincere, and we left 
 together, my desire being to see him safe home to his 
 lodgings in Lothian Street. No, he would accom- 
 pany me through the silent midnight streets that fine 
 summer evening. So we walked backwards and for- 
 wards for probably another hour between the High 
 Street (where the office of the Scotsman then was) and 
 Lothian Street, till at last the inevitable "good-night " 
 was spoken. I got to my post to find my work for the 
 night all but finished by Mr. Russel, who immensely 
 enjoyed the " fix " in which he had left me, and was 
 much surprised at my having, by any device or exer- 
 cise of moral courage, got out of it. As De Quincey 
 said of Coleridge that the first difficulty was to get 
 
 1 Mr. John Ritchie, proprietor of The Scotsman; 
 Mr. Russel being its editor. 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. 29 
 
 in that tone of despondency into which he 
 occasionally fell, of the melancholy that 
 
 him to begin to talk and the second to get him to 
 stop, so of De Quincey the first difficulty was to 
 induce him to visit you and the second to reconcile 
 him to leaving. He would have sat up talking all 
 night on this or any other night as readily as he 
 did one night with Mr. "Woodhouse (Mr. Garnett's 
 edition of the Confessions, p. 212) (in that case 
 also after a long sederunt at dinner), quietly happy 
 in the exercise and interchange of thought, and 
 oblivious of the lapse of time. He ate almost nothing 
 (we were always careful to have some light soft food 
 prepared especially for him), he drank nothing, even 
 under "social pressure," beyond one or two wine- 
 glassfuls of extremely weak brandy and water, and 
 out of his own lodgings I never saw him touch 
 laudanum. He seemed on such occasions truly, as 
 he calls himself in his Confessions or Autobio- 
 graphical Sketches, "an intellectual creature," inde- 
 pendent of the ordinary wants and conditions of 
 humanity. Something of congenial company — once 
 he was in it ; for it was not a necessity to him ; it 
 sought him, not he it — with speculative and pleasant 
 talk, so beguiled for him hours that might otherwise 
 have been weary and heavy-laden that they glided on 
 unregarded by himself, and only reckoned by his 
 companions as too short to have had crowded into 
 them so much worth remembering that each memor- 
 able opinion or expression was but too apt to jostle 
 the other out of recollection. 
 
3o PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 attached to looking back upon life ; how 
 small is the benefit which people in the 
 course of it obtain from experience which 
 they really only acquire when they have little 
 further use for it ; and how mortifying it is 
 to reflect how very different a man's course 
 might have been had he known at the begin- 
 ning what he knows at the end of it. For 
 himself, he said, so "stale, flat, and unprofit- 
 able" was the retrospect, that he turned 
 away from it " shuddering and ashamed." 
 
 I told him that Dr. Robert Lee 1 had ex- 
 pressed a desire to be introduced to him, and 
 asked if I might take the liberty of bringing 
 him to call. He said he should be delighted. 
 " I have long known him," he said, " from his 
 public appearances, have admired his learn- 
 ing and liberality, and had I not been the 
 miserable, incapable creature that I am in 
 all such matters, I should certainly have 
 
 1 Minister of Old Grey-friars' Church, Edinburgh. 
 He was a leader of liberal thought and practice in the 
 Church of Scotland, and as usual ^vas denounced and 
 persecuted in its courts, his great merits and services 
 only now coming to be fully acknowledged — fifteen 
 years after his death. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 31 
 
 sought an introduction to him long ago. I 
 should, therefore, be extremely grateful to 
 you if you will so far trouble yourself in the 
 matter as to be the medium of bringing us 
 together." I remember, either on this or on 
 a subsequent occasion, speaking to him of Dr. 
 Lee's pulpit appearances, and asking him if 
 he would not come to hear him preach. He 
 said that he never went to church ; on which 
 I remarked that probably he had not per- 
 sisted so long in doing so as another friend 
 of mine who declared that he went to church 
 until it became a sin to go. He said he 
 feared that he could not entertain the idea 
 of returning, even to hear Dr. Lee, for the 
 irksomeness which he had often endured of 
 sitting listening to a man groping and fumb- 
 ling, where he saw a clear way to leap, was 
 so intolerable that he could not subject him- 
 self to the slightest risk of a repetition of 
 such mental agony. 
 
 Mr. Burton, hearing that De Quincey was 
 in town, asked him to supper, and requested 
 me to call at Lothian Street for him on my 
 way from George Square to Ann Street, 
 
32 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 Stockbridge — where Burton then lived — and 
 if possible to bring him with me. On calling 
 on the evening in question (28th June 
 1854) at De Quincey's lodgings, I found he 
 had left a message for me, to say that he 
 would meet me on the Dean Bridge. There 
 accordingly I found him, and on expressing 
 my satisfaction at seeing him so far on his 
 way to Mr. Burton's, he begged that I would 
 not infer from the fact of his being on the 
 way that he was going there. Naturally 
 enough at such an odd remark my inclination 
 was to laugh, and to try a little banter ; but 
 for this his tone was too grave and sincere. 
 "I have come out," he added, "to try whether 
 the delightful air of this fine summer evening 
 will do anything to dispel that intolerable 
 languor and deep-seated suffering that distract 
 me, and to which I have been a martyr for 
 days." I tried to persuade him that as 
 there was no party — only my uncle and 
 another friend — a little society might pro- 
 bably help him towards attaining a more 
 cheerful state of mind. But he would not 
 be induced. He said he felt so wretched 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCBY. 33 
 
 that he could not face any one — that there 
 were times when he fled from his best friends, 
 and that this was one of them. Besides, he 
 said that if he went he would be compelled, 
 by a desire to bring himself up to something 
 like the common level of humanity, to take 
 some stimulant, a little wine or spirits, and 
 that for such indulgence, even to an amount 
 which in any other person would be not 
 only ordinary but trivial, he should afterwards 
 suffer the pangs of hell. " Oh, my God," 
 he exclaimed, "the miseries I have been 
 born to endure; what tortures I have suffered, 
 and what tortures am I yet doomed to suffer." 
 I was greatly pained and distressed. Nothing, 
 he said, but a large dose of laudanum gave 
 him relief; that he took such a dose to 
 enable him to get through a burst of work 
 occasionally, but that he dare not repeat it 
 too often, and so in the intervals he had 
 nothing for it but to endure. 
 
 We wandered, as usual, into all sorts of 
 subjects, and amongst others he spoke of 
 Dugald Stewart, whom he did not estimate 
 highly, referring to the slight notice he took 
 
 F 
 
 -•■<- 
 
34 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 of Kant as evidence of his not being at all 
 alive to the magnitude of the revolution 
 which Kant's system of philosophy was cal- 
 culated to effect. With considerable per- 
 suasion I got him to go so far as the north 
 end of Ann Street, which I was enabled to 
 do the more readily as he said he recollected 
 that Wilson lived in that street in his early 
 days. I had drawn him thither with a vague 
 hope that if Burton had been on the outlook 
 we might have pulled him in after all. But, 
 unfortunately, no such chance occurred, and 
 we parted at the end of the street, he 
 insisting that I should not make myself late 
 by going back with him. 
 
 On Saturday, 29th July, of the same year, 
 I called on De Quincey at his lodgings in 
 Lothian Street, to ask him to come round to 
 my uncle's to supper next evening, when we 
 expected Burton, who had been disappointed 
 by his previous non-appearance. We had 
 some talk about Burton and his prodigious 
 power of working. " He seems," said De 
 Quincey, " to hunger and thirst after oppor- 
 tunities of working, a feeling which I am 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 35 
 
 perfectly incapable of comprehending." We 
 talked of Burton's appointment as Secretary of 
 the Prison Board, and De Quincey remarked 
 that he was well acquainted with his pre- 
 decessor, Mr. Ludovic Colquhoun. He 
 knew the family, and had often been asked 
 to Mr. Colquhoun's, or his father's to 
 dinner ; and, though he never went, he had 
 frequently called to apologise for not having 
 gone. We talked about his (De Quincey 's) 
 articles on Pope, Shakspeare, and Goethe, 
 in the seventh edition of the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica. On my telling him how much 
 pleased I had been to find my own precon- 
 ceived notions of Goethe confirmed by his 
 high authority, and by the good reasons he 
 gave for such opinion, he went pretty fully 
 into the whole question of the nature of 
 Goethe's genius. Among other things he 
 mentioned that Wordsworth, who was apt to 
 take extreme opinions upon such subjects, re- 
 garded Goethe as little better than a quack. 
 Wordsworth, he said, never read books, but 
 somehow or other Wilhelm Meister had 
 fallen in his way, and he had gone through 
 
36 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 it till he came to the scene where the hero, 
 in his mistress's bedroom, becomes senti- 
 mental over her dirty towels, etc., which 
 struck him with such disgust that he flung 
 the book out of his hand, would never look 
 at it again, and declared that surely no 
 English lady would ever read such a work. 
 
 Invited to return to see him, I called 
 from time to time ; half an hour's conversa- 
 tion with him was a privilege I valued too 
 highly to risk drawing upon it too often. 
 He was ready to talk on any subject ; the 
 day's news ; the articles in the Scotsman ; 
 recent books; our common friends; anything 
 that came uppermost ; for he was in converse 
 a man of the world, and no mere pedant or 
 bookworm. At times he would play, as it 
 were, with trivial topics in talk ; treating 
 them with a sort of mock importance. For 
 example, in this way he once entered into a 
 long dissertation on the troubles of dressing. 
 Shaving, especially, he said, was a grand 
 difficulty. After collecting the best informa- 
 tion on the subject, he had purchased a set 
 of first-rate razors, but he had been told that 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 37 
 
 they could not be kept in order without con- 
 tinual stropping, a task to which he could 
 not think of subjecting himself; besides 
 which there was the necessity for keeping a 
 soap-box, an article of furniture he utterly 
 abhorred. Some years after he solved the 
 difficulty by allowing his beard to grow. The 
 first time that I saw him in this state, the 
 under part of his face covered with thin 
 gray hair, he explained to me that his hirsute 
 condition was not owing to his having 
 joined the " mustache movement," as it was 
 called. He hoped that I would acquit him 
 of any such utter imbecility as that. It 
 all arose, he said, from the old difficulty of 
 razors. He could not be troubled shaving 
 himself, and he could not endure any other 
 person shaving him. The intolerable smell 
 of a barber's fingers in every case in which 
 he had attempted to undergo the operation, 
 had filled him with disgust so great that he 
 could barely muster courage and polite- 
 ness to endure its being carried out. 1 
 
 1 Once when he had walked in from Lasswade to 
 dine at George Square he was shown into a room to 
 
38 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 On one occasion (14th November 1854) 
 I called to ask for him, he having sent word 
 that from illness he could not come to supper 
 
 wash in which was a fixed basin with hot and cold 
 water, an arrangement not so common thirty years 
 ago as now. Turning on the water, I left for a 
 moment to fetch a towel, and on my return found Mr. 
 De Quincey standing in an attitude of paralysed per- 
 plexity a little way off from the nearly brimful basin. 
 His alarm was lest the basin should overflow and 
 deluge the room, an evil which I explained was pro- 
 vided against. He justified his fears by calling atten- 
 tion to the rapid inflow of the water, and made the 
 most amusing comparisons of himself to the hero of 
 the German story Undine, overwhelmed by waters 
 which he had conjured up but could not control. I 
 daresay he must have used to me in his description of 
 his plight some such phrases as that very characteristic 
 one in his Logic of Political Economy, in which he 
 speaks of water bearing no value in a country like 
 this "except under that machinery of costly arrange- 
 ments which delivers it as a permanent and guaranteed 
 succession into the very chambers where it is to be 
 used." His language naturally and unavoidably 
 shaped itself into such stately phrases ; if any auditor 
 were tempted to smile at their occasionally somewhat 
 inappropriate pomp and elegance he would have 
 readily joined in the laugh — though, indeed, he rarely 
 laughed at all — and would have amplified the illus- 
 trations and heightened the humour of the occasion. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 39 
 
 at George Square as he had promised to do. 
 He stated that he had made an effort to write 
 an explanatory note, but was unable to do 
 so, and had been obliged to content himself 
 with a message. His foot, he said, had been 
 affected by his having been taking large 
 doses of opium ; "in fact," he said, "my leg 
 is quite black, from the foot to considerably 
 above the knee." He treated lightly my 
 expressions of regret at such an alarming 
 appearance, saying that he had had it before, 
 and knew how far it would go, and how it 
 could be got quit of. 1 The best cure, he 
 said, would be to take six months' walking ; 
 on which I said that his case was like that of 
 St. Denis : — " Ce n'esf que h pre?nier pas qui 
 coiite." How was he to begin this regimen? 
 He answered that by his leaving off opium, 
 even for a few days, his leg would so far 
 recover as to enable him to go out ; " but," 
 he says, " I cannot do that, for without opium 
 
 1 In an unpublished letter, of date March 9, 1846, 
 he speaks of an abrasion on his heel having " brought 
 back that dreadful Purpura from which I suffered so 
 much for three years." 
 
40 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 I can't get on with my work, which the pub- 
 lishers are urging me to complete. The 
 work must be done ; the opium can't be left 
 off; therefore I cannot begin to walk, and 
 the leg must take its chance." 
 
 He remained in these lodgings from 1854 
 until his death five years afterwards ; his tem- 
 porary residence thus becoming permanent, 
 with, I believe, an interval of not more than 
 five or six months at Lasswade. This was 
 extremely characteristic ; in fact he had 
 walked into town from Lasswade to these 
 lodgings, where he had been some years 
 before, without any preparation in the way 
 of luggage or otherwise ; and he explained 
 to me if it had not been that his landlady, 
 Mrs. Wilson, being a conscientious and care- 
 ful woman, had preserved for him a quantity 
 of clothing which he had left on his former 
 sojourn, he would have been in sad straits as 
 to dress. Into such straits he occasionally 
 lapsed afterwards, for I remember his frankly 
 telling me that on one occasion he could 
 not go out to walk because he had not a 
 pair of trousers. Of course it was sheer 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 41 
 
 carelessness on his part ; even the vigilant 
 supervision of his daughters was insufficient 
 to keep him, in these matters, in anything like 
 the condition of ordinary mortals. 
 
 Thus far I have brought my recollections 
 into something of consecutive and connected 
 order ; for the rest, I must be content to 
 present them rather disjointedly ; or, at least 
 as mere notes or memoranda. 
 
 30M July 1854. — De Quincey came to 
 supper with us in George Square on Sunday. 
 We were en famille ; l the only other guest 
 
 1 My grand-uncle's family consisted of his niece my 
 mother, my two sisters, and myself ; and an old habit 
 was kept up by the household of having a small supper 
 on Sunday evening at the highly unfashionable hour 
 of nine o'clock, at which one or two friends usually- 
 dropped in. To my uncle, who was at that time 
 nearly eighty years of age — he died in 1870, having 
 almost completed his ninety -third year — Mr. De 
 Quincey took a great liking, admiring and commenting 
 on his great mental and physical vigour in advanced 
 age, and on his independence and strength of judg- 
 ment. Though nearly fifteen years younger than my 
 uncle, De Quincey looked the older man of the two, 
 and, both, having personal memories of events of 
 
 G 
 
42 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 being Burton. We spoke of the different 
 habits of men in drinking different liquors. 
 He said he used to be fond of gin and water, 
 and drank it till Byron's Life was published, 
 when he gave it up, because he did not wish 
 to be accused, however falsely, of imitating 
 Byron, even in that. He was much amused 
 by my account of a scene between Sydney 
 Dobell, Professor Piazzi Smyth, Mr. Augustus 
 St. John, and Leitch Ritchie, which I told him 
 I had witnessed. 1 The incident had occurred 
 a short time previously (4th February) and 
 was this : — Leitch Ritchie had asked some 
 
 earlier date than we of a second or third generation, 
 they found many topics of mutual interest apart from 
 literature and politics. My uncle's natural courtesy 
 and kindness of disposition likewise attracted De 
 Quincey, as it did Thackeray, who always spoke of 
 him as " that kind old gentleman." 
 
 1 Mr. Leitch Ritchie was at this time editing 
 Chambers's Journal ; Mr. Robert Chambers was one 
 of this party. His brother William Chambers spoke 
 of Leitch Ritchie to Thackeray as "the most gentle- 
 manly literary man we {i.e. the Messrs. W. and R. 
 Chambers) had ever had to do with," a saying which 
 Thackeray repeated with an expression of supreme 
 scorn. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 43 
 
 friends to supper at his house (32 Danube 
 Street, Edinburgh), to meet Mr. John Augustus 
 St. John, author of several books of travel, a 
 fine looking man of between sixty and seventy, 
 who had lost his eyesight from ophthalmia in 
 Egypt. Among those who arrived early, was 
 Mr. Piazzi Smyth, Professor of Astronomy, 
 Edinburgh University. He has an impedi- 
 ment in his speech which sometimes altogether 
 prevents utterance for a few moments. Leitch 
 Ritchie himself, again, was extremely deaf. 
 The deaf man, the blind man, and the 
 stammering man, were all the company who 
 had arrived, except Dr. Findlater 1 and my- 
 self, when the door opened and Mr. Sydney 
 Dobell was announced. Dobell rushing into 
 the room, as soon as Leitch Ritchie mentioned 
 in a vague way, " Mr. Dobell — Mr. St. John," 
 seized by the hand, not Mr. St. John, but 
 Professor Smyth, and began a speech he 
 evidently had cut and dry. "And is it 
 possible that I hold by the hand one who 
 bears the illustrious name of St. John ! " 
 Smyth in vain attempted to assert his identity; 
 1 Editor of Chambers's Encyclopedia, etc. 
 
44 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 his tongue refused its office. Leitch Ritchie, 
 not hearing Dobell's hushed tones, looked on 
 bewildered. It was the blind man, Mr. St. 
 John himself, who came to the rescue, say- 
 ing, " It is I whose name is St. John." 
 Whereupon Dobell turned to him and began 
 "Oh, then, is it possible, etc." Findlater 
 and I not being sufficiently familiar in the 
 house, and knowing none of the parties 
 except Smyth and Ritchie, had not felt it 
 right to interfere, but remained amazed and 
 amused spectators. Of course Dobell's 
 speech fell very flat, and, besides, St. John 
 further set him down, though gently, by 
 telling him he had no connection with the 
 Bolingbroke family. De Quincey said the 
 complication was as complete as anything the 
 older dramatists ever fancied. He said that 
 walking — a long walk — gave extraordinary 
 depth and spirituality of expression to ladies' 
 eyes. Mr. Burton towards midnight hinted 
 that he was waiting for him to give the signal 
 to rise. De Quincey protested he had been 
 waiting for him, Burton. Burton said he could 
 not think of rising before him. We all talked 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 45 
 
 away for a time, and Burton again spoke of 
 going. " Oh, no," says De Quincey, " since 
 you give me the privilege of fixing the time I 
 shall not be coerced, and, even to show my 
 independence, shall have a little more brandy 
 and water and conversation." 1 
 
 iqth September 1854. — De Quincey dined 
 with us at George Square — with Russel. I 
 called for him at his lodgings in Lothian 
 Street at a quarter before five. He drew my 
 attention to his being ready before the time, 
 pointing to the clock. The weather had 
 been very fine, but the sky was beginning to 
 get cloudy and gray, and I said that I feared 
 a change. De Quincey said " Yes, but it 
 will be gradual. All the great operations of 
 nature are slow, and the grand dome of fine 
 weather which has hung over us for weeks is 
 not to be lightly or suddenly broken up." 
 Some rather dirty little children were lingering 
 in the common passage of the stair as we 
 came out to the street. He smiled his 
 
 1 Sometimes De Quincey preferred to come after 
 dinner, rather than sit through a meal of which he 
 could partake so little. See page 54. 
 
4 5 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 sweet pensive smile, and patted one of them 
 on the head — she, poor little thing, rather 
 shrinking from the attentions offered by so 
 weird-looking a patron. He turned to me, 
 and we smiled together. 
 
 At dinner Mr. Russel asked him why he 
 lived in town at this season when he had 
 such a nice place in the country. He said, 
 " The convenience consists in this; that there 
 seems less criminality in disappointing printers 
 when they send only to the next street, than 
 when they come seven miles." I asked him 
 about his daughters. Miss Florence had 
 been expected from Ireland on Friday, and 
 he had been out at Lasswade on that day, 
 but had not waited to see her. " She was 
 expected at six, and I left at five." In course 
 of some talk about Professor Wilson, Mr. 
 Russel remarked on his pension, and on his 
 having had to go to the Whigs for it. De 
 Quincey spoke of its disproportionate amount 
 — £o°°i one fourth of the whole sum 
 annually allowed for literary distinction to 
 be absorbed by Wilson. We spoke of Wil- 
 son's thin-skinnedness. Quillinan's poems 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 47 
 
 were reviewed by " Blackwood " as " Poems 
 by a Heavy Dragoon." Quillinan in retalia- 
 tion parodied in verse Lockhart's description 
 of Wilson in " Peter's Letters. One of the 
 lines was : — 
 
 " And catch a pig, although its tail be soaped." 
 
 Wilson's resentment was intense. Mrs. 
 Wordsworth asked Wilson some time after- 
 wards, when he happened to be in the Lake 
 district, if he would object to dine with 
 Quillinan. He fired up and exclaimed, 
 " Oh, no, I'll dine with the Devil if he be 
 asked to the same party." De Quincey 
 remarked as a bad feature in Wilson's char- 
 acter his love to be surrounded by parasites 
 — persons who were lower in position than 
 himself, and who ministered to his vanity. 
 He ridiculed the sickly, false sentiment of 
 his works, and their evidently insincere and 
 vulgar, over-wrought religionism. His works 
 — his tales at least — were a jest among the 
 Wordsworths. De Quincey spoke of Wilson 
 as a lecturer. He had heard him once or 
 twice. All dignity and impressiveness as a 
 
4 3 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 lecturer were destroyed by his drawing his 
 forefinger down the side of his nose at the 
 end of almost every paragraph. De Quincey's 
 imitation of the action was very droll. He 
 said that the hearer began to anticipate it 
 whenever he saw Wilson coming to a pause, 
 and the fulfilment of the expectation raised 
 a sense of the ridiculous even in Wilson's 
 grandest passages. His perverse emphasis — 
 on "this," and "and," and "of," and other 
 insignificant words — was also very distressing 
 to a sensitive ear. 
 
 We asked De Quincey about Wordsworth's 
 personal appearance. His figure, he said, 
 was bad, and his walking " sidling," he did 
 not keep his own line of path. Wordsworth 
 thanked God that there was only one man 
 in England he would go out of his way to 
 see, namely, Belzoni. De Quincey remarked 
 on the beggarly idea of renown Wordsworth 
 entertained in regarding as nothing", all the 
 intellect and worth of England as compared 
 with a man seven feet high, who could walk 
 about with a living pyramid on his shoulders. 
 Wordsworth's scorn of public opinion was 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 49 
 
 excessive. It was not superciliousness, but 
 an almost inhuman scorn. This was a 
 natural reaction of the abuse he suffered 
 early. He (De Quincey) had, he said, on 
 one occasion to show the honours of the 
 vale of Grasmere to a French visitor, and 
 was greatly diverted by Wordsworth's and 
 the Frenchman's almost unconcealed con- 
 tempt for each other. Wordsworth's feeling 
 was on account of the French Revolution, 
 and from a neglect and scorn of strangers 
 in general; and the Frenchman's feeling 
 arose from his having derived all his ideas 
 of Wordsworth from the Edinburgh Review, 
 and regarding him as the very imbecile of 
 literature. " Nothing," De Quincey re- 
 marked, " could be more unfortunate than 
 the titles given to Wordsworth's larger poems. 
 The argument of the ' Excursion ' has nothing 
 to do with the accident of the excursion that 
 gives its name to the poem. Then the 
 ' Prelude ' has a name equally inappropriate. 
 He designed it as the opening of a great 
 poem, but as the great poem was never 
 finished, the ' Prelude ' stands as an opening 
 
 H 
 
So PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 to nothing. The chief weakness of the 
 ' Excursion ' lies in the commonplace nature 
 of its religious sentiment — nothing higher 
 than what you might hear intelligent old 
 women talk on such subjects." 
 
 Of Mrs. Crowe as a writer he expressed 
 great admiration, especially as to her power 
 in arranging plots. Her machinery was 
 coarse — a murder — but the ingenuity with 
 which in Me ft and Women she distributes 
 the suspicion of the murder between four or 
 five persons was most masterly. 
 
 He spoke highly of Southey; his strict 
 honour and good-nature, and mentioned his 
 feeling of humiliation in having his articles 
 in the Quarterly altered by Gifford. De 
 Quincey said Lamb was one of the most 
 loving and delightful of men ; Southey one 
 of the most estimable. 
 
 We talked of Hannah More. De Quincey's 
 mother built a house near Hannah More's 
 for the express pleasure of enjoying her 
 society. De Quincey himself, though not 
 admiring her, was of course compelled to 
 tolerate her. The Mores were six maiden 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 51 
 
 sisters, the youngest sixty, and the eldest 
 eighty. Miss More's manner was very lady- 
 like and refined, and her sisters were very 
 nice women, " but eaten up with the cant of 
 Methodism." Remarking on Sheridan's giv- 
 ing Wilberforce's name instead of his own 
 when found lying drunk, De Quincey went 
 on to picture Wilberforce's horror at having 
 in succession all the seven deadly sins fastened 
 down upon him by similar imputations. 
 Hannah More was ignorant of Wordsworth's 
 merits as a poet till she was struck with the 
 extracts from the " Excursion " given in the 
 Edinburgh Review. She could not believe 
 that these noble Miltonic lines had been 
 written by a man whom the reviewers had 
 been assailing for years. " Of course," said 
 De Quincey, " I had too mean an opinion 
 of Miss More's intellectual powers to have 
 condescended to indicate Wordsworth's abili- 
 ties to her." 
 
 Of Moore's Byro7i he spoke as a miser- 
 able piece of biography, slovenly and slight. 
 With the materials Moore might have made 
 an admirable Life. 
 
 ' Hi , *mmmmmm 
 
52 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 On one occasion we had a conversation 
 on the chances of long life. De Quincey 
 said it had been observed that people had not 
 the same chance of long life if one or other 
 of their parents had not attained it. " Now, as 
 my mother survived till she was nearly a 
 hundred, I fear that I shall be compelled to 
 drag out existence to a protracted period, 
 and I look forward with horror to being left 
 helpless, a burden and trouble to others." I 
 reminded him that as his mother had retained 
 all her faculties, he had the best hope of 
 doing so also. " True," he replied, " but 
 she was one of the most temperate of beings, 
 living a pure and gentle life. Now, I have 
 tampered so much with opium, and tried my 
 mind and health in so many ways, that I 
 cannot look for a like immunity from the 
 natural ills of age." I referred him to my 
 uncle as an example of cheerful and con- 
 tented old age, with full possession of all 
 the faculties. 
 
 2dDecemberi%$^. — Called on De Quincey 
 at Lothian Street, and found him seated in 
 bed, dressed in a flannel vest with sleeves, 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 53 
 
 and his bed covered with books, papers, etc. 
 He apologised for so receiving me ; said he 
 seldom rose till four or five; for though 
 uncomfortable everywhere, he was less un- 
 comfortable in bed than anywhere else. I 
 asked him if he had heard from his daughters. 
 He said not lately, and that he could not ex- 
 pect to do so, for he had not written to them, 
 or rather he had never despatched his letters 
 to them — for he had written many — and that 
 there were probably thirty or forty pages of 
 unsent notes to them lying somewhere about 
 his room. 
 
 I mentioned Ferrier's Institutes of Meta- 
 fihysiC) just published. De Quincey said he 
 had the highest possible opinion of Ferrier's 
 powers of thinking ; but that he could not 
 from Ferrier's letters comprehend his sys- 
 tem, and was anxious to see his book, in 
 the hope that it would make the matter 
 clearer. 1 
 
 1 "When Ferrier was a candidate for the Chair of 
 Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, De Quincey wrote 
 a testimonial for him ; a highly characteristic pro- 
 dcution — a disquisition in the form of a testi- 
 
 - •■ ~ 
 
54 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 We spoke of the remarkable change that 
 had recently been gradually wrought in tolera- 
 tion of freedom of thought on religious sub- 
 jects. De Quincey said he tried thirty years 
 ago to get a bookseller to accept a translation 
 of Strauss, but that everybody shrank from 
 it. " But now, Strauss is not only translated 
 but patronised, talked about, and introduced 
 into society, like a tiger into a drawing-room." 
 He spoke of a professor of heterodox opinions 
 in this country having been in the position 
 of a man seeing a crowd with angry eyes on 
 every side of him. 1 
 
 2d March 1855. — Misses Florence and 
 Emily de Quincey were at an evening party 
 with us last night, and they were to stay 
 over to-day. I asked Mr. De Quincey, who 
 was staying in Lothian Street, to come down 
 to dinner at five, or in the evening. He 
 sent word that he would come at six ; then a 
 note. It was as follows : — 
 
 monial — which may be seen by the curious in the 
 collection of such documents in the Advocates' 
 Library. 
 1 See Appendix B. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 55 
 
 " Friday , 2d March. 
 " My dear Sir — It struck me, as a causist, 
 that an answer almost rude, which should not 
 keep your messenger waiting, must be preferable 
 in your eyes to any answer more entirely cere- 
 monious, that should occupy the time of your 
 servant at an hour when perhaps it would be 
 most in request. The rudeness I should have 
 left to heal itself. But it strikes me suddenly 
 that I may have left room for a misconstruction, 
 or rather for a suspicion upon your part of a 
 misconstruction upon mine. By saying that I 
 would come down at six, it is just possible that 
 I may seem to have misread your dinner-hour, 
 as being six instead of five. This is not the 
 case. I meant to say that I would come im- 
 mediately after dinner ; which now, on revising 
 my plan, I will assume to be nearly seven. 
 Having no paper accessible at this moment, I 
 use a fragment of your own note. — Ever, my 
 dear Sir, Your obliged, 
 
 "Thomas De Quincey." 
 
 He came and remained talking with my uncle 
 and the rest till eleven. I had to leave 
 early for my night's work. Talking of Words- 
 
 ~m M**»*e 
 
56 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 worth's Guide to the Lakes, De Quincey said 
 that on its original publication he offered 
 Wordsworth an account of the origin and 
 character of the language of the Lake district, 
 which unlocked all its peculiar nomenclature ; 
 but " Wordsworth, who never liked to be 
 obliged to anybody for anything, declined it 
 in his usual haughty and discourteous manner, 
 and it was ultimately published in a Kendal 
 newspaper." 1 
 
 2d May 1855. — Called on De Quincey at 
 Lothian Street. Found him in his room, 
 with a small glass half filled with liquor of 
 the colour of pale port, and a phial of un- 
 diluted laudanum beside it on the table, 
 which was covered as usual with books and 
 papers. He complained of pain in his left 
 arm which, as he described it, seemed like 
 rheumatism. It prevented his sleeping, and, 
 unfortunately, he said, laudanum had no 
 effect on it. I advised him to try chloroform, 
 applied externally, which led to some talk 
 about chloroform. Then of vaccination, and 
 
 1 No doubt in the Westmoreland Gazette, of which 
 De Quincey was himself editor in 1819. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 57 
 
 the immunity it afforded from the curse of 
 small-pox. I remarked on the fewer persons 
 marked with small-pox now to be seen in the 
 streets. He said that it was still more notice- 
 able some years ago in contrasting English- 
 men with foreigners, who were marked in 
 far greater proportion. I mentioned Pope's 
 allusion to small-pox, as one of the greatest 
 curses of life, classed by him with old age, 
 in the Rape of the Lock, and De Quincey 
 expressed surprise at his not recollecting the 
 couplet. He spoke of small-pox as a dis- 
 figurement, and said it was difficult to imagine 
 a more horrible moment than that in which 
 a once beautiful young woman, who had 
 suffered from the frightful disease, looked in 
 her mirror again for the first time. Fortun- 
 ately, he said, human life seldom presented 
 in its course such fearful trials of fortitude. 1 
 1 7 th November 1856. — Called on De 
 Quincey in Lothian Street about five. Found 
 him at tea; his room littered with MSS., 
 books, etc. ; small glass of laudanum in one 
 hand, teacup in other. I called to ask him 
 1 See Appendix C. 
 I 
 
58 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 to dine with us, to meet Thackeray, on the 
 following Saturday. He said he would do 
 his best to come, but had work on hand 
 which he must have finished this week, and 
 also that he had not been out of his house 
 since May. 
 
 Talk of his revised Confessions, just pub- 
 lished. On my alluding to a note referring 
 to Coleridge's opinion on the famous passage 
 in Job, " I know, etc," and to Dr. Robert 
 Lee being engaged in a controversy with the 
 Witness newspaper on this point, he asked 
 me if Dr. Lee knew of Coleridge's opinion. 
 I told him I had sent Dr. Lee the volume 
 of his Selections, in which the passage is 
 commented on, and that he was much 
 pleased with it. De Quincey said that the 
 last conversation he had had with Coleridge 
 was about this very passage. Coleridge 
 had in his writings declared against the 
 commonly received opinion about it ; but 
 De Quincey having heard he had retracted, 
 questioned him about it. Sara Coleridge, 
 his daughter, "full of talent, learning, and 
 piety — rather too much of that indeed" — 
 

 
 Cost %™<iJr^~ c l c L . /%rmu~)i- <friu**t ■ 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 59 
 
 had induced him to retract, or to appear to 
 do so, because the opinions he had expressed 
 were disagreeable to the pietist connection 
 in which she moved. But the impression 
 De Quincey's conversation with him left was 
 that Coleridge had not done so sincerely, 
 but only for peace. " For myself," said De 
 Quincey, " I should as soon expect to find 
 something about the blood of Christ blurting 
 out in the pages of Livy or Plato as an allusion 
 to immortality in this old Arabian writer." 
 
 On the Saturday a little note came from 
 De Quincey as follows : — 
 
 " My dear Sir — On Wednesday evening I 
 was obliged to attend a party, from which I 
 returned with a most distressing affection of 
 the chest ; and since then the greater part of 
 every day has been passed in bed. To-day up 
 to 3 o'clock I endeavoured to struggle with it, 
 but have been obliged to go to bed. I am 
 ashamed to have caused you any trouble ; but 
 in deep sincerity I am wholly disabled even for 
 sitting up. — Pray believe me your obliged 
 "Thomas de Quincey. 
 
 ' ' Sat. 22d November. ' ' 
 
V 
 
 w 
 
 3/ 
 / 
 
 ttLCl 
 
 T 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 59 
 
 had induced him to retract, or to appear to 
 do so, because the opinions he had expressed 
 were disagreeable to the pietist connection 
 in which she moved. But the impression 
 De Quincey's conversation with him left was 
 that Coleridge had not done so sincerely, 
 but only for peace. " For myself," said De 
 Quincey, " I should as soon expect to find 
 something about the blood of Christ blurting 
 out in the pages of Livy or Plato as an allusion 
 to immortality in this old Arabian writer." 
 
 On the Saturday a little note came from 
 De Quincey as follows : — 
 
 " My dear Sir — On Wednesday evening I 
 was obliged to attend a party, from which I 
 returned with a most distressing affection of 
 the chest ; and since then the greater part of 
 every day has been passed in bed. To-day up 
 to 3 o'clock I endeavoured to struggle with it, 
 but have been obliged to go to bed. I am 
 ashamed to have caused you any trouble ; but 
 in deep sincerity I am wholly disabled even for 
 sitting up. — Pray believe me your obliged 
 "Thomas de Quincey. 
 
 1 ' Sat. 22 d November. ' ' 
 
60 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 When I told Thackeray that we had hoped 
 to get De Quincey to come to meet him, he 
 said he felt much flattered, and that nothing 
 would have pleased him more than to have 
 met a man whose writings he so much ad- 
 mired. I handed him the note of apology \ 
 he praised in his quietly enthusiastic way the 
 extreme neatness of its style, and penman- 
 ship, and antique courtesy of its tone. 
 
 Two other notes referring to invitations 
 are characteristic enough to be recorded. 
 They are of dates 29th January and 30th 
 January 1859. I was anxious to get De 
 Quincey to meet our friend Mr. Carruthers 
 of Inverness, who remembered him in old 
 times ; and wished to renew the acquaint- 
 ance. The reference in the first letter to 
 " Miss Jean Stark " is to his landlady's sister, 
 whose attention and devotion to him par- 
 took of 
 
 " The constant service of the antique world, ' J 
 
 and showed strongly his power of attracting 
 and enchaining interest in all who came in 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEY. 61 
 
 contact with him. 1 His allusions to Mr. 
 Russel's articles explain themselves ; and 
 his final congratulation to the Scotsman is in 
 reference to Miss Isa Craig (now Mrs. Knox) 
 having just gained the prize of 50 guineas 
 for the Centenary Burns Ode offered by the 
 Crystal Palace Company. 
 
 Letter. 
 
 ' ' You will find somewhere below, but buried in a 
 heap of words, that, to my great regret, I shall not 
 be able to join your party to-day. 
 
 " My dear Sir — I beg your pardon for what 
 must have seemed inattention in acknowledging 
 no sooner your kind invitation for to-day. But 
 literally I could not. What you were told 
 yesterday, viz., that I had gone abroad to walk, 
 was a romantic fiction, ' pure and simple,' of 
 Miss Jean Stark's. And certainly, when her 
 ' hand was in,' she might as well have asserted 
 that I was botanising on the Himalayahs — 
 which would have been conclusive, needing no 
 more words — whereas now she has left to you 
 the labour of reading, to me of explaining, that 
 in order to meet the anxiety of my publisher 
 
 1 See Page's Life ; and Masson's De Quince*;. 
 
62 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 (who knows, or who fancies, a special benefit 
 from publishing in January), I was last night, 
 and am through this day, entangled in the very 
 final arrears and valedictory P. S. of my ioth 
 vol. The word ioth makes me ashamed ; but 
 it is Boston that is answerable, Yankee Boston. 
 I am, as it happens, unable at this time to 
 walk ; that might have been remedied by a 
 cab ; but there is a more complex hindrance 
 from the grievous defect (or default, or how 
 shall I express it?) of an amanuensis — my 
 youngest daughter, who otherwise is my right 
 hand, being unavoidably absent in Tipperary ; 
 and thus it is that I am embargoed triply in 
 this anchorage of No. 42 L. Street. 
 
 " Whilst waiting to hear from the Press, let 
 me mention that I have some half-dozen 
 * plaints ' against Mr. Russel as regards state- 
 ments of fact. One, a bagatelle, arises this 
 morning as to Lord Ripon. istly, His exact 
 nickname was Prosperity Fred. 2dly, This 
 name was given to him by Cobbett. So far I 
 am sure ; at least positive — which means 
 obstinate. 3dly, I think, but am not viciously 
 certain, that the name had no special reference 
 to any prediction ; rather, I should say, to his 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 63 
 
 retrospects ; to the general flattering haze with 
 which he invested his budgets, or prefatory 
 abstracts when introducing his budgets as 
 Ch. of the Exch. Was it not Prosp. Fred who 
 made the discovery that Taxes 'fructify' in our 
 pockets ? 
 
 " It must be a great satisfaction and a just 
 ground of pride to the Scotsman establishment 
 that a foster child of their own evocation, a 
 daughter of their own encouragement, should 
 have had this distinguished success — being 
 herself crowned amidst her own act of coron- 
 ation — reaping whilst she thought only of 
 sowing. 
 
 "I halt suddenly but unavoidably; for the 
 Fiend is up from St. Andrew Sq. seeking 
 whom 
 
 " Ever most truly yours, 
 
 " Thomas de Quincey. 
 " Sat. 29th Jan." 
 
 The second note is as follows : — 
 
 il Stmday, ^oth Jan. 
 " My dear Sir — Nothing is more distressing 
 to me than the being compelled by uncontrol- 
 lable accidents to decline what I should natur- 
 
64 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 ally regard as an invitation alike flattering and 
 friendly. Nine days hence you will yourself 
 understand from a letter which I will then write 
 to you, how impossible it was for me to do 
 otherwise. 
 
 " Mr. Carruthers I had a special interest in 
 meeting about 20 years ago ; if I do not greatly 
 mistake I met him — not at Prof. Wilson's house 
 — but in his company. Since then Mr. Car- 
 ruthers has written, with results known to the 
 Antipodes (who, however, continue little the 
 better for the information constantly reaching 
 them) on the Biography of Pope. Consequently, 
 having myself also troubled those waters — tho' 
 only enough to stir up the mud — I have a per- 
 sonal as well as a general interest in him. So 
 I should have made an effort, you may be sure, 
 to meet him. 
 
 " That fair Incognita who condescended to 
 leave the letter of invitation, connected herself 
 in the strangest fashion of cross-readings with 
 the final words of my dreams ; which dreams 
 she broke up ; so that in fact I have a message 
 for her from the land of dreams, true and false. 
 
 " Yours ever ; excuse the writing ; it has 
 suddenly (3.30) grown dark as Erebus." 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 65 
 
 It will be seen that in the sudden darkness 
 of the winter afternoon he had omitted to 
 append his signature ; and it is, I daresay, 
 needless to add that the explanatory letter, to 
 be written " nine days hence," never came to 
 hand. The " fair Incognita " was simply the 
 maid who had handed in my note. 
 
 For a year or two before he died Mr. De 
 Quincey rarely moved out of doors. I called 
 on him from time to time, but have no notes 
 of those later interviews. Once Miss Jean 
 Stark reported that he regretted he could not 
 see me, as he was particularly engaged ; and 
 the next time I went he was profuse in 
 apologies, stating that he had been in a 
 chaos of books and manuscripts and clouds 
 of dust, searching for a missing document of 
 some importance. The confusion of this sort 
 in which he lived was marvellous. After his 
 death Mrs. Craig told me that the mass of 
 letters and notes, many unopened, to be gone 
 over was bewildering. In the heterogeneous 
 heap, too, stray pound notes and packages of 
 small coin, in silver and copper, were so numer- 
 ous as, when collected, to form a consider- 
 
 K 
 
66 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 
 
 able sum. Some of the notes were between 
 the leaves of books ; the parcels of coin had 
 probably been handed to him as change, laid 
 aside, and forgotten. The task of looking 
 over lent books, and returning them to their 
 owners, as far as these could be discovered, 
 was also a heavy one. 
 
 During his last illness he sent for me, and 
 I saw him several times. On the last occa- 
 sion I remained only a few minutes, as he 
 was extremely feeble ; yet in all his weakness 
 his wonted courtesy prompted him, on my 
 rising to leave, to deplore that, from inability 
 to rise, or even to turn fully in bed, he was 
 unable to ring, and that so I was left to show 
 myself out. His youngest and only unmar- 
 ried daughter, Emily, was with him at this 
 time, and she promised to let me know if I, 
 or any of our family, could be of any service. 
 We did not therefore risk disturbing them by 
 sending or calling often, and indeed, having 
 had experience of his surprising recoveries 
 from previous illnesses, we were not fully 
 alive to the gravity of this one. Most unfor- 
 tunately, two notes which Miss De Quincey 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 67 
 
 posted to me failed, through being imper- 
 fectly addressed, to reach me in time. On 
 the afternoon of the 8th December 1859 a 
 rumour reached me that De Quincey was 
 dead, and I hastened to Lothian Street, in some 
 hope, however faint, that rumour lied. " Is 
 what I hear true?" I said to the kind land- 
 lady, Mrs. Wilson, who opened the door. 
 Without answering she ushered me at once 
 into the chamber of death. On the simple 
 uncurtained pallet, whence in that last inter- 
 view he had smilingly, with all those delicately 
 polite regrets, said goodbye, the tiny frame 
 of this great dreamer lay stretched in his last 
 long dreamless sleep. Attenuated to an ex- 
 treme degree, the body looked infantile in 
 size — a very slender stem for the shapely 
 and massive head that crowned it. The face 
 was little changed ; its delicate bloom indeed 
 was gone, but the sweet expression lingered, 
 and the finely-chiselled features were unal- 
 tered I was profoundly impressed ; the 
 more so, perhaps, that, as it so happened, I 
 had never seen a dead person since I was a 
 child of seven years old. In the next room 
 
68 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS. 
 
 I found his tearful and agitated daughters — 
 Mrs. Craig, who had arrived a day or two 
 before, and Miss Emily. They spoke much 
 of the patience and resignation with which 
 he suffered; of his gentleness and consid- 
 erateness to the last. He grudged giving 
 them the slightest trouble, even when he 
 most required attendance. On one occa- 
 sion when they were moving him in bed, 
 and lifting his feet, he, using a grand 
 generalisation in a spirit of the most pro- 
 found humility, and snatching, as it were, at 
 a sacred sanction for his exacting the care he 
 needed, said, "Be gentle, be tender; remember 
 that those are the feet that Christ washed." 
 
 Ascertaining that there existed no adequate 
 portrait of Mr. De Quincey in his later years, 
 I suggested that a cast of his face should be 
 taken. This was done by Mr. (now Sir) 
 John Steell, R.S.A. ; and from this cast, 
 aided by other materials, this eminent sculp- 
 tor produced, in the shape of a noble marble 
 bust, a permanent record of the strikingly 
 intellectual and refined lineaments of " The 
 English Opium Eater." 
 
APPENDIX A. 
 
 P. 2. Mrs. Baird Smith with her daughters 
 and Miss De Ouincey now live in London. 
 To all the three daughters no small share of 
 their fathers attractive intellectual qualities de- 
 scended ; to the eldest, perhaps, in somewhat 
 fuller measure, especially in so far as a certain 
 fluent facility and felicity of expression in talk 
 and writing reflected, in a softer and feminine 
 fashion, the celerity of conception and copious 
 stores of reflection and information so notable 
 in her father. 
 
 Mrs. Baird Smith's contributions to Mr. 
 Page's Life 1 of her father sufficiently indicate 
 her fine literary faculty, and Miss Emily, in 
 the same pages, displays a like gift. 
 
 It may be permitted here to make some men- 
 tion of the services of Colonel Baird Smith ; ser- 
 
 1 Thomas De Quincey : his Life and Writings ■, by H. A. 
 Page. Two vols. London, 1877. 
 
7 o APPENDIX. 
 
 vice faithful unto death. The brief record on 
 his tomb in Calcutta Cathedral is as follows : — 
 
 Colonel Richard Baird Smith of the Bengal 
 Engineers, Master of the Calcutta Mint, C.B. and 
 A.D.C. to the Queen, whose career, crowded with 
 brilliant service, cut short at its brightest, was born 
 at Lasswade on the 31st of Dec. 1818. He went to 
 India in 1836. Already distinguished in the two 
 Sikh Wars, his conduct on the outbreak of revolt in 
 1857 showed what a clear apprehension, a stout heart, 
 and a hopeful spirit could effect with scanty means in 
 crushing disorder. Called to Delhi as chief engineer, 
 his bold and ready judgment, his weighty and tena- 
 cious counsels, played a foremost part in securing the 
 success of the siege and England's supremacy. The 
 gathered wisdom of many years spent in administer- 
 ing the Irrigation of Upper India, trained him for his 
 crowning service — the survey of the great famine of 
 1 86 1, the provision of relief, and the suggestions of 
 safeguards against such calamities. Broken by ac- 
 cumulated labours, he died at sea Dec. 13, 1861, aged 
 scarcely 43 years. At Madras, where his Indian 
 career began, his body awaits the resurrection. 
 
 There may be added, in correction of a mis- 
 apprehension as to his share in the work at 
 Delhi, the following from Colonel Malleson's 
 History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. 
 
 "Major Baird Smith, an honour even to the corps 
 of engineers . . . was chief engineer of the army 
 before Delhi, and brought to the performance of his 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 7* 
 
 duties the large mind, the profound knowledge, the 
 prompt decision, which had characterised him in his 
 civil work. Neither the shock and pain caused by a 
 wound, nor the weakness and emaciation produced 
 by a severe attack of camp scurvy, aggravated by 
 diarrhoea, depressed his spirits or lessened his energies. 
 Refusing to be placed on the sick list, though assured 
 that mortification would be the result of a continued 
 use of this wounded leg, Baird Smith clung to the last 
 to the performance of his ditty. The advice which he 
 gave to General "Wilson proved that never was his 
 courage higher, never were the tone and temper of 
 his mind more healthy, than when, bowed down by 
 two diseases, and suffering acutely from his wound, 
 he seemed a livid wreck of the man he once had been. 
 It was to such a man that Wilson appealed. The 
 answer was clear, emphatic, and decisive. Baird 
 Smith was for action, for prompt and immediate 
 action." 
 
 APPENDIX B. 
 
 P. 54. His daughters were at this time in 
 Ireland, and though very ill he was reluctant 
 to hurry them home. His condition seemed 
 so serious that I felt it a duty to force his 
 hand so to speak, and of the results he 
 gives the following account in a letter to Miss 
 Florence : — 
 
 December 8, 1854. My Dearest Florence— This 
 morning — viz. Monday, December 4th — came into 
 
72 APPENDIX. 
 
 my hands your letter and Emily's appendix. I had, 
 however, previously possessed myself of a pen, and 
 was in visionary conceit tracing out, whilst yet unaware 
 of any communication from Tipperary, that letter 
 which now, three hours later, I am actually writing. 
 The fact is, I am alarmed at the premature explosion 
 of a train which I had laid on Saturday (December 2d) 
 for drawing your attention in a leisurely way to Mavis 
 Bush. The match has ignited the train far sooner 
 than I had counted on. And thus it is possible enough 
 that you may be thrown into needless hurry. It had 
 happened that on Saturday the 2d, Mr. Findlay called, 
 as sometimes he is kind enough to do, and on my 
 explaining the general course of my correspondence 
 with you — viz. that I write a letter — parboil it, as you 
 may say, i.e. half- finish it, then order it, in House of 
 Commons phrase, " to lie on the table," during which 
 repose several strata of other papers gather over it 
 within a few days or hours, so that very soon it is 
 "snowed up," and finally it withdraws into darkness. 
 Hearing this, I say, Mr. Findlay kindly undertook to 
 apprise you, or M. or E., how the matter stood, and 
 that the time was drawing near when I should want 
 various papers (now at Mavis Bush) for the fifth 
 volume. This service I counted on his fulfilling about 
 four or five days later. But, behold ! yesterday being 
 Sunday, the very next succeeding day he called with 
 a Times newspaper, and at the same time left a 
 note informing me that he already had written — viz. 
 not to any one of you three, but to Mr. Craig. I am 
 anxious, therefore, as the train is actually fired, to 
 intercept any evil consequences. I announce, there- 
 
APPENDIX. 73 
 
 fore, that if you could set off ten or eleven days from 
 this, i.e. about the 18th day of December, you will 
 meet the most clamorous of my purposes. You see 
 there are counter-perils to weigh off against the perils 
 of procrastination. I declare it will be a lesson to me 
 for the rest of my life not to hurry. 
 
 The Times contained a review of his works. 
 A month after this he was again alarmingly ill 
 — see Page, vol. 2, p. 94. 
 
 APPENDIX C. 
 
 P. 57. There is a lapse here in my notes 
 which may be appropriately supplied by a 
 notice by De Quincey himself of one of his 
 visits to my uncle's house. In a letter addressed 
 to his daughters of date July 31, 1855, tne 
 following passage occurs : — 
 
 Last week, viz. on Thursday the 26th of July, I 
 dined by invitation with a small party — men only — at 
 Mr. Ritchie's in George Square. Mr. Ritchie and his 
 family have been very kind in their attentions to me. 
 But, to finish my story of the dinner-party, — on enter- 
 ing the drawing-room, inquiries buzzed about me as 
 to your whereabouts and intentions with regard to the 
 homeward route, etc. ; and upon my answering that 
 I had reason to look for you (speaking nautically) 
 " in all August" somebody said, " We understand, 
 Mr. De Quincey, you are going to lose another of your 
 
 L 
 
74 APPENDIX, 
 
 daughters." This arose naturally out of a previous 
 inquiry about M. and the chances of her coming ovei 
 to England ; but it took me so far by surprise that I 
 did not know how to treat it, for I was not certain as 
 to F.'s own wishes on this point. However, I said, 
 smiling, that such a rumour was certainly current. 
 "Aye, but it's more than a rumour," said Mr. Russel, 
 the editor of the Scotsman ; and then it came out that 
 on the morning of this very Thursday a son of Lord 
 Dunfermline's, one of the Abercrombies, who is now 
 by accident on a visit to Edinburgh, had announced 
 the news as highly probable. He is our British 
 Minister at Turin ; and it had so happened, that when 
 Colonel Baird Smith was studying the system of irriga- 
 tion in the King of Sardinia's Continental dominions 
 (Piedmont, etc.), he was invited to take up his quarters 
 in the hotel of our English Legation, which he did, 
 and thus became intimately acquainted with Sir Ralph, 
 for I believe that this son of Lord D.'s is the one known 
 as Sir Ralph A. So that here is at once an end to 
 all further secrecy, if you had any wish for it. On 
 this occasion, by the way, as previously at Mr. J. B.'s, 
 I found all persons loud in the praise of Colonel 
 Baird Smith. 
 
 Sir Ralph, it may be noted, was the only son 
 of the first Lord Dunfermline (James Aber- 
 crombie, speaker of the House of Commons) ; 
 he succeeded his father as second Lord Dunferm- 
 line, and dying without male issue, with him 
 the title became extinct. 
 
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