to talk!" said Mrs. Carlyle. Hartley Coleridge was scarcely the man to send to cudgel any one, even a dwarf. With his constant drinking, it was as much as he could have done to keep himself upright; that he should be expected to knock a man down was surely unreasonable. In those summer holidays of my boyhood which I spent at Ambleside I often heard stories of his intemperance. He was living at that time in a cottage on the road to Rydal, supporting himself mainly by giving lessons. No prudent person, I was told, in offering him refreshments, ever had more than a single glass of wine brought in. If the whole bottle was set before him, he was sure to finish it. One summer, on my returning to Ambleside, I learnt that he was dead. He had been overcome with drink at some friend's house or at an inn. Staggering homewards, he had crept into a low shed, where he had passed the night on the bare earth. The chill which he caught carried him off in a few days. Every one spoke of him with kindly pity. His only enemy was himself. The following letter was written to the wife of my uncle the barrister; in what year I do not know: Monday Night, October 12. MY DEAR MADAM, - I have been obliged to go to bed from mere overpowering want of sleep, and thus - viz. by sleeping too long (having only this minute awakened)-I have unavoidably broken up our plan, which was to have come up in a coach, and have left it to your choice either to return with us (viz. our party of last night), or else to retain us as your companions during M Hill's absence: - This on the assumption that you had no other engagement. At present, though too late for this choice, yet on the same assumption of your being not otherwise engaged, I write to propose that M De Quincey, myself and my daughter, should come up: - we shall take tea before coming. But we are not quite sure whether we were right in understanding that you did not yourself mean to accompany the gentlemen to the dinner-party. One word of answer will suffice-viz. YES, meaning that you are at home and disengaged, or not better occupied in reading, writing, etc. No, meaning generally that you are unavoidably engaged. Believe me, my dear Madam, Ever your faithful Servant On September 23, 1828, my uncle had written to his wife: "I found De Quincey, who has for the tenth time renounced opium, which he said he had not tasted for one hundred and eighty days. He received me with great warmth." In some Reminiscences which my uncle left he says: "De Quincey possessed but few books, and those few were generally where he was not. His habits of life to other evils added that of procrastination, and this practice caused him often to revolve the matter of his works for years before he reduced his thoughts to writing." A curious instance of this revolving habit is thus described by Mrs. Carlyle: "A boy of the English opium-eater's told me once he would begin Greek presently; but his father wished him to learn it through the medium of Latin, and he was not entered in Latin yet because his father wished to teach him from a grammar of his own, which he had not yet begun to write." In the fewness of the books. which De Quincey possessed he was like Wordsworth and Landor. Wordsworth had never had many books, while Landor gave away his almost as fast as he got them. It was the want of them which led him into those errors as to facts and those inaccuracies in quotation with which his writings are thickly strewn. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, one of my comrades, the late Professor John Nichol, of Glasgow, son of the author of "The Architecture of the Heavens," told me that his father first met De Quincey at a dinner-party in Edinburgh. The little man came very late, dressed in a rusty suit of black. In the drawing-room, after dinner, he and Dr. Nichol stood together in a corner, |