Quincey chiefly looked for extrication from his immediate pecuniary difficulties. The correspondence between them, at this and at other dates, leaves no room to doubt that Colonel Penson was a very generous uncle indeed, and responded most kindly and promptly to such calls from his nephew. And he lived long enough to know that this nephew, the troublesome boy of former days, had come to be recognised by the world as a man of rare genius and a great English writer, of whom any uncle might be proud. How long he remained in India the information at hand does not enable us to say; but he did return, and spent his last days in his native land. He died on the 27th of June 1835, and was buried, it is believed, in Cheltenham. De Quincey had been then for some years an inhabitant of Edinburgh.

So much by way of supplementary information respecting two of the senior personages in De Quincey's autobiographic papers. What follows is supplementary to the notices that occur there of De Quincey's wife and children.

De Quincey's marriage with Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a substantial Westmoreland yeoman, his near neighbour at Grasmere, occurred some time late in 1816, when he was in his thirty-first year, and the bride in her eighteenth or nineteenth. One of the most beautiful passages in the Confessions is that in which she is described as the fair young wife seated at the tea-table in the little cottage at Grasmere in the first years of their married life. Then there are glimpses of her, touchingly pathetic, in that later year or two, also described by De Quincey, when his thraldom to opium was at its worst, incapacitating him for work of any kind, and converting the poor young wife and mother into the nurse, day and night, of her drug-benumbed and spectre-haunted husband. Gradually there came recovery from this extreme prostration, with the exertions required by the shattered state of the household finances, first in the temporary editorship of the Westmoreland Gazette, and then in that visit to London in 1821, in quest of more promising literary employment, the great event of which was the publication of the Opium-Eating Confessions in their magazine form. When De Quincey returned to Grasmere in

December 1821, it was partly, he tells us, that he might be able, with the aid of such " fuller memoranda as he had there, and of the recollections of her who had been his "only companion" through the years of his worst suffering, to write the continuation of his Confessions which he had publicly promised. The promise, as we know, was not fulfilled; and, when the Confessions appeared in book-form in the little volume of 1822, the sole addition to the reprinted magazine articles was a somewhat scraggy "Appendix." But, after another year of invalid and idle life at Grasmere, De Quincey again roused himself; and between 1822 and 1825 we find him in the very busiest years of his contributorship to the London Magazine,—sometimes sending his papers from Grasmere, but more than once back in London for several months together, writing in lodgings, and trying whether London might not be the best permanent residence for himself and his family. Baffled in that experiment after all his exertions, he is again at Grasmere in 1825, and in a state of the utmost despondency, when light begins to break upon him from a quarter to which he had looked wistfully already, but hitherto in vain. There were beckonings to him from Edinburgh by his friend Christopher North, now lord of Blackwood's Magazine, and able to convince the proprietors of that periodical, if they required to be convinced, that regular contributions from such a celebrity as "The English Opium-Eater" would be well worth their while. From 1826 onwards, accordingly, it is Blackwood that succeeds the London Magazine as De Quincey's sheet-anchor, and Edinburgh that succeeds London as his place of hope. Consequently, through the four years between 1826 and 1830, while the cottage at Grasmere was still kept up, and De Quincey's wife and children continued to reside there, his own visits to Edinburgh, and residences there, were increasingly frequent. Perhaps the most interesting memorial extant of this period of his comings and goings between Edinburgh and his home at the Lakes is in a preserved letter of Carlyle's to him from Craigenputtock, of date 11th December 1828. Carlyle and his wife had become well acquainted with De Quincey personally during their recent short residence in Edinburgh after their marriage; and Carlyle now sends a cordial invitation to

him to visit them in their Dumfriesshire solitude. It is but a short way, he tells De Quincey, out of his direct route between Edinburgh and Westmoreland; he will meet with the "warmest welcome"; and, though the scenery around Craigenputtock, consisting chiefly of bogs, may be drearier than that of the English Lakes, it is not without attractions and capabilities! If there were a sufficiency of fit residents in it, for instance, why should it not produce and support a literary school of its own, that should rival that of the Lakists ? "But the misery is the almost total want of "colonists! Would you come hither and be King over us, "then indeed we had made a fair beginning, and the 'Bog "School' might snap its fingers at the 'Lake School' itself!" After more fooling" of this kind, as Carlyle calls it, he adds seriously, "I have a thousand things to ask concerning you : "your employments, purposes, sufferings, and pleasures. "Will you not write to me? Will you not come to me and "tell? Believe it, you are well loved here, and none feels "better than I what a spirit is eclipsed in clouds." The reference in these last words is, in part at least, to the still hampered condition of De Quincey's finances. His Edinburgh earnings, one finds from other records, were still insufficient, as his London earnings had previously been, for the concurrent expenses of his household at Grasmere and of himself when away from it. It was the good Dorothy Wordsworth, we learn from these records, that suggested at last the proper remedy. By her advice, Mrs. De Quincey and the children, some time in 1830, when it had become clear that Edinburgh, and Edinburgh alone, was to be the scene of De Quincey's future literary industry, left their native vale of Grasmere and joined him in the northern city. He was then forty-five years of age, and his wife about two and thirty. One would like to be able to imagine distinctly the life of the English dalesman's daughter as it was spent among strangers through those subsequent years of De Quincey's still chequered fortunes, with changes of domicile from the town to the suburbs, and from the suburbs back to the town, which were the closing stage of her companionship with the singular man of genius to whom fate had wedded her. But the materials are deficient. "Delicate

"health and family cares," says one of her daughters, "made "her early withdraw from society; but she seems to have "had a powerful fascination for the few friends she admitted "to her intimacy." Further than these words imply we must be content to guess, save that among her troubles, after her coming to Edinburgh, there are registered the deaths of two of her children: first, her youngest boy, Julius, in 1833, in his fifth year; and next, in 1835, her eldest and first-born, William, in his eighteenth year, his father's pride and the glory of the household. Two years after this second blow, on the 7th of August 1837, she herself died. She was buried in the grave in St. Cuthbert's churchyard in which De Quincey's own body now rests. Rather more than twenty-two years was to be the duration of his widowerhood.

Three sons and three daughters, alive at the time of their mother's death, the eldest then not more than nineteen years of age, remained in De Quincey's charge in Edinburgh, or rather to take joint charge of De Quincey and of themselves as well as they could. For the first two or three years of his widowerhood the habitation of the family was still in Edinburgh; but in 1840, as we already know, began the tenancy of that pleasant cottage at Lasswade, seven miles out of the town, which was to be the more convenient home thenceforward for the young people when their father's literary labours did not permit him to be with them, and for himself too whenever he could be in their company. Hardly, however, had the little household at Lasswade been formed, when the eldest of the sons, Horace, went out to China as an officer in the 26th Cameronians. There, after having served through a campaign under Sir Hugh Gough, he died of a malarious fever in 1842, before he had completed his twentieth year. Of the two remaining sons, the next in age, Francis, after having been for some time clerk in a commercial house in Manchester, returned to Lasswade in 1845, and, having qualified himself for the medical profession by attendance on the medical classes in the University of Edinburgh and by some subsequent experience in an Edinburgh medical appointment, emigrated in 1851 for the practice of his profession in Brazil By that time the youngest son, Paul Frederick, was also abroad, for a more adventurous career in India. Having

received a commission in the 80th Queen's Regiment, he was present at the battle of Sobraon, the last battle of the Sikh war, on the 10th of February 1846; and he remained in India, seeing further service there, and winning distinction and promotion, for the next eleven years. Meanwhile, the three daughters remaining together in the Lasswade home, and De Quincey having domesticated himself with them completely at last, in the character of their sole protector and the natural head of the household after the sons had gone, there had arrived for him that happiest and most tranquil period of his declining life in which one likes now to remember him. We see him from 1849 to 1854, or from his sixtyfourth year to his sixty-ninth, living habitually in his Lasswade home, all his pecuniary anxieties now at an end, and with no other troubles left than those of feeble health and the effects of opium,-his days passing pleasantly amid his books and papers, or in solitary rambles in a circuit of well-known lanes and country roads in the vicinity, or sometimes in the longer trudge into Edinburgh of which he was still fond and for which he would make occasion, but invariably in the evenings in the society of his daughters, or of neighbours who dropped in, or of admiring visitors from a distance who had come to dine with him or take tea with him by express invitation. Of the several incidents by which, in succession, this quiet routine of the domestic life at Lasswade was interrupted, the first, as the reader of our General Preface in Vol. I. may recollect, was the marriage of De Quincey's eldest daughter, Margaret. By her marriage in 1853 to Mr. Robert Craig, the son of a highly respected Lasswade neighbour, followed as it was by the removal of the married pair to Ireland for a farming enterprise of the husband's, the two younger sisters, who had till then shared with her in the domestic management, were left in entire charge. In that same year, however, as the reader may be reminded, there had been begun the publication of the Collective Edinburgh Edition of De Quincey's writings, the labours over which were found by him increasingly incompatible with the seven miles of distance between Lasswade and the Edinburgh printing-office. Hence, in 1854, his requartering of himself, for the purposes of his continued editorial labour, in those