DE QUINCEY’S essay on “The Pains of Opium” gives him a unique place among English essayists. In it he surpassed himself as far as he did every other writer of luminous description. His longer critical essays are often prolix past the limits of pardonable dullness, and in criticism he is not infrequently arrogant as well as dull. But what may not be pardoned to the author of such a masterpiece—unequaled and inimitable because it is so evidently an attempt at genuine description of actual suffering! French “degenerates” who have eaten hashish or opium for the express purpose of imitating it might have succeeded had they been equipped beforehand with De Quincey’s brain to be acted on by the drug. As they were not, the essay remains unique—as it should remain, for one of its class is certainly “enough for nature and for glory.”

  In his essay on “Anecdotage” De Quincey is at his worst as well as at his best, for in reviewing Miss Hawkins’s book of “Anecdotes” he borrows from her all the material he needs to make his own essay interesting, and then, following a habit of the reviewers of the time, he exhibits his own superiority at the expense of her faults, laboriously exhibited for that purpose. He is much happier in his Shakespearean criticisms. The essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” stands at the head of its class, and in “The Loveliest Sight for Woman’s Eyes” he illustrates the tenderer mood of his later years.

  It is not easy to guess where the twentieth century at its close will place De Quincey among the essay writers of the nineteenth. He cannot rank with Macaulay or Taine as a master of style, but in “The Pains of Opium” he surpasses without effort the highest results of Carlyle’s attempts at phosphorescent prose, and none of the mere strivers after the picturesque are to be compared to him. He lacked only one thing of greatness—virtus!

  He was born August 15th, 1785, near Manchester, England. His father, a wealthy merchant, educated him at the best schools and at Oxford, but he seems to have owed more to the peculiar physique and temperament of genius than to his masters. As a child he was “shy and sensitive,”—with a nervous organization so fine and susceptible that he learned difficult languages as children with “a musical ear” learn music. At thirteen “he wrote Greek with ease; at fifteen he not only composed Greek verses in lyric measures, but could converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment.” Perhaps it may have been true of him as one of his masters said: “That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one.” Almost every great poet, great orator, or great writer of memorable prose, has had this faculty. It is not a disease, as some have supposed who have called it “hyperæsthesia,” but it is the natural condition of unspoiled nerves, co-related in poets and writers with the musical ear in musicians, and capable, in its reactions against abuse, of producing such suffering as that De Quincey describes in “The Pains of Opium.” The blindness of Homer and of Milton, the madness of Swift, the early death of Byron and of Keats,—these are not symptoms of disease, but merely certain assurances that men born with the nervous system which belongs to universal human nature in its ultimate perfection cannot live on the moral and intellectual plane of the generation into which they are born, except at the expense of torture and the risk of death.

  After leaving the university De Quincey was dependent on his pen for a livelihood, and his “Confessions of an Opium Eater” were first published as contributions to the London Magazine. When republished in book form in 1821, they gave him almost immediately the high rank as a prose writer he has since held. He died December 8th, 1859, and some of his best essays were published posthumously.