OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER ALSO THE LIVES OF SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON THIRD EDITION LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW AND NEW YORK 1888 19.7 UNIVERSITY 45*310 MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY. 1. Sheridan's Plays. 2. Plays from Molière. By English Dramatists. 3. Marlowe's Faustus and Goethe's Faust. 4. Chronicle of the Cid. 5. Rabelais' Gargantua and the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel. 6. Machiavelli's Prince. 7. Bacon's Essays. 8. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. 9. Locke on Civil Government and Filmer's "Patriarcha.” 10. Butler's Analogy of Religion. II. Dryden's Virgil. 12. Scott's Demonology and 19. Voltaire's Candide, and Ellwood. 33. Emerson's Essays, &c. 34. Southey's Life of Nelson. 35. De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater, &c. 36. Stories of Ireland. By Miss EDGEWORTH. 37. Frere's Aristophanes: Acharnians, Knights, Birds. 38. Burke's Speeches and Letters. 39. Thomas à Kempis. 40. Popular Songs of Ireland. 41. Potter's Eschylus. 42. Goethe's Faust: Part II. ANSTER'S Translation. 43. Famous Pamphlets. 44. Francklin's Sophocles. 45. M. G. Lewis's Tales of Terror and Wonder. 46. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. 47. Drayton's Barons' Wars, Nymphidia, &c. 48. Cobbett's Advice to Young Men. "Marvels of clear type and general neatness."-Daily Telegraph. INTRODUCTION. THOMAS DE QUINCEY was born on August 15, 1785, in Greenhays, a suburb of Manchester. He was the fifth child of a Manchester merchant who traded with America and the West Indies. He inherited a delicate and nervous constitution. His father, long absent in warmer climates, came home to die of consumption at the age of thirty-nine. Thomas De Quincey then was only seven years old. The division of the father's property secured to each of the boys a sum yielding £150 a year. From a school at Salford Thomas De Quincey, at the age of eleven, was sent to the Bath Grammar School, where he was famous for his Latin verse, and at fifteen could not only write lyric verse in Greek, but also talk Greek fluently. "That boy," he heard one of the masters say of him to a stranger, "could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." He highly approved of the master who had this opinion of him, but he was a nervous boy, morbidly sensitive and selfconscious. He went home ill of a box on the ears. His mother nursed him, removed him from the Bath school, had him taught at home for a time, and then sent him to a school at Winkfield for a year. As a boy of fifteen he then went with a boy friend, Lord Westport, son of an Irish Earl, to Ireland; and had what he called a revelation, from the admiration he conceived for a "fine young woman of twenty." When he came back from Ireland he aspired to go at once to Oxford, but his guardians resolved that he should increase his means for college education by spending three years at the Manchester Grammar School, since by so doing he could secure a scholarship of £50 a year for some years. De Quincey went to school again unwillingly, continually pleaded for release, sent to his mother a list of his miseries, and when this proved ineffectual, ran away. He hovered about his mother's home at the Priory, in Chester, on his way to Wales, hoping to see a sister, was observed and brought in, but by the advice of his mother's brother, Colonel Penson, an Indian officer then home on furlough, he was allowed to go on his ramble in Wales, receiving a guinea a week as long as he corresponded with his guardians. Very soon he ceased to correspond, and found his way to London in the way described in his "Confessions." Back at last in Chester, where his uncle was still at the Priory, De |