VII.-1. Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the State of Popular Education in England. 2. Communications from E. Chadwick, Esq., C.B., respecting Half-Time, and Military and Naval Drill, and on the Time and Cost of Popular Education on a Large and on a Small Scale. 1861. 3. A Letter to N. W. Senior, Esq., explanatory of 6. The Workhouse Orphan. By the Author of A Plea for the Helpless.' London, 1861. 7. On Girls' Industrial Training. By Rev. J. P. Norris, late Fellow of Sion College, Cambridge, and one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools. London, 1860. 8. Two Letters on Girls' Schools, and on the Training of Working Women. By Mrs. Austen. London, 1857. 9. The Claims of Ragged Schools to Pecuniary Educa- tional Aid from the Annual Parliamentary Grant, as an integral part of the Educational Movement of the Country. By Mary Carpenter. London and Bristol. 10. Report on the Education of Destitute Children. VIII.-Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the Translator of IX.-1. Reports of the Committee of the House of Lords appointed to consider the Assessment and Levy of Church-rates. London, 1859-60. 2. Speeches of John Bright, Esq., M.P., on the Second and Third Readings of the Bill for the Abolition of Church-rates. Hansard's Debates. London, 1861. 3. The only Compromise possible in regard to Church- rates. By Lord Ebury. London, 1861. 4. The Designs and Constitution of the Society for the 544 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-Selections, Grave and Gay, from Writings published and unpublished by Thomas De Quincey. Edinburgh and London, 1854-60. 14 vols. 12mo. THE HE position of De Quincey in the literature of the present day is remarkable. We might search in vain for a writer who, with equal powers, has made an equally slight impression upon the general public. His style is superb: his powers of reasoning unsurpassed: his imagination is warm and brilliant, and his humour both masculine and delicate. Yet with this singular combination of gifts, he is comparatively little known outside of that small circle of men who love literature for its own sake, which, in proportion to the population, is not an increasing class. Of the causes which contributed to this result, such as depended on his own character will develop themselves in the course of our remarks. Of the others, it is sufficient to point out these two, that he neither completed any one great work, nor enjoyed the advantage of being represented by any great periodical; a circumstance which has sometimes given permanence and unity to a writer's reputation as effectively as independent authorship. That his essays are not, in general, upon popular subjects is of course another element in the case; although they only require to be read to show how easily a man of genius can lubricate the gravest topics by his own overflowing humour, without making the slightest approximation to either flippancy or coarseness. As we fancy, however, that even less is known of his birth, parentage, and education, than of his literary remains, we shall endeavour to make our sketch of him complete by prefacing our critical remarks with a brief memoir of his earlier career as far as it can be extracted from the fragmentary materials which he has left us. The subject of this article was born at 'The Farm,' a country house occupied by his father near Manchester, on the 15th of August, 1785. But his earliest recollections were of Greenhays,' a villa near the same town, where he was brought up in all the comfort and elegance of the household of an opulent English merchant. His family was of Norwegian origin, but, as he assured George III., had been in England since the Conquest. Thomas was the fifth of eight children, and, if his own reminiscences are to Vol. 110.-No. 219. B be be credited, was a warmhearted but musing, imaginative, and rather weakly child. The death of two elder sisters before he had completed his sixth year left a lasting impression on his mind; and he has described, in language of great force and beauty, his sensations at the funeral of one, and the singular dreams with which his first experience of death inspired him. His father died when Thomas was in his seventh year, leaving Greenhays, with a fortune of 16007. a-year, to his widow. This father the child had scarcely ever seen. Business kept him constantly abroad; and the only means by which he contrived to see his family at all was by meeting them occasionally at a watering-place, to which Thomas was considered too young to be taken. But Mr. De Quincey's death brought back another comparative stranger to the family hearth, in the shape of the eldest boy, then about twelve years of age, who had been educated at Louth Grammar School. The advent of this brother precipitated De Quincey's 'Introduction to the world of strife,' an initiation which he admits was not without considerable advantage both to his moral and physical constitution. His natural addiction to loneliness and dreaming, combined with grief for his sisters' loss, was generating in him an unwholesome condition of both mind and body, which his brother's arrival rudely, but opportunely, dissipated. De Quincey says himself, in reference to this period of his childhood, that he thanks Providence for four things-first, that he lived in a rustic solitude; secondly, that the solitude was in England; thirdly, that 'his infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters,' instead of 'horrid pugilistic brothers;' finally, that he and they were members of a pure, holy, and magnificent Church.' But our readers must not suppose that De Quincey had any real doubt about the paramount utility of a public school education; though at the age of six years the world of strife,' as opened to him by his elder brother, proved anything but soothing to his feelings. This brother seems, in all respects, to have been. a remarkable boy. He read lectures on physics to the rest of the nursery. He endeavoured to construct an apparatus for walking across the ceiling like a fly, first on the principle of skates, and subsequently upon that of a humming-top. He was profound on the subject of necromancy, and frequently terrified his young admirers by speculating on the possibility of a general confederation of the ghosts of all time against a single generation of men. He made a balloon; and wrote, and in conjunction with his brothers and sisters performed, two acts of a tragedy, in which all the personages were beheaded at the end of each act, leaving none to carry on the play, a perplexity which ultimately caused Sultan Amurath' to be abandoned to the housemaids. In all these matters, 6 however, , however, no especial burden was imposed on Thomas. It was first in his position as major-general of his brother's army, and secondly as absolute monarch of the kingdom of Gombroon, that he suffered the worst terrors and anxieties. The two boys went every morning to a private tutor's house and returned in the afternoon, on one or both of which occasions a fight invariably took place with the boys of a neighbouring factory, chiefly carried on with stones, and, as it would appear from its bloodlessness, at a safe distance. These military operations were of course under the control of the elder brother, who directed Thomas's movements upon the flank or rear of the enemy, sometimes planting him in ambush and sometimes as a corps of observation, as the exigencies of the case required. Arriving at home, he issued a bulletin of the engagement, which was read with much ceremony to the housekeeper. Sometimes this document announced a victory, and sometimes a defeat; but the conduct of the major-general was criticised without reference to the result. Now he was decorated with the Bath, and now he was deprived of his commission. At one time his services merited the highest promotion, at another he behaved with a cowardice that seemed inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery.' Once he was drummed out of the army, but 'restored at the intercession of a distinguished lady' (the housekeeper to wit). In these singular vicissitudes of fortune two whole years were passed; but, extraordinary as is the air of reality which De Quincey has thrown around this description, it is even less wonderful than the picture of his own feelings as king of the island of Gombroon, threatened, not remotely, with annexation, by the superior potentate his brother. 'How, and to what extent,' my brother asked, 'did I raise taxes on my subjects?' At this question the model young prince was staggered. He abhorred taxation of all kinds. But then he knew that, if he said as much, his ambitious neighbour would jump to the conclusion that he had no standing army-an idea which he felt would be fatal to his own independence. But though he evaded this particular difficulty, a shocking discovery was in store for him. In an evil hour his brother became 'acquainted with Lord Monboddo's theory of the human race; and he presently announced the fact that the inhabitants of Gombroon had not yet worn off their tails. This was a hideous piece of intelligence. As absolute ruler, Thomas might at once issue an edict compelling his people to sit down six hours every day, 'and so make a beginning,' or he might dress them in the Roman toga, as the best means of hiding their appendages. But either alternative left the great fact untouched that he was king of a nation of Caudati, and he continued plunged in the profoundest melancholy throughout the remainder of his reign. At the expiration of two years his brother's proficiency with his pencil caused him to be transferred to the house of the celebrated academician, Mr. de Loutherbourg, where he died of typhus fever at the age of sixteen. Being no longer under the necessity of protecting his subjects from the neighbouring potentate of Tigrosylvania, the monarch of Gombroon laid aside his crown, and retired into private life. The ensuing four years, i.e. from his eighth year to his twelfth, were marked by no incidents particularly worthy of commemoration, except the removal of his family from Greenhays to Bath, and his own entrance at the Bath Grammar School. Here he made numerous enemies by the superiority of his Latin verses: and he was ultimately removed from the school, primarily, indeed, in consequence of an accident, but, secondarily, because his mother was unwilling that he should hear so much of his own merits. From Bath he went to another school, at Winkfield, in Wiltshire, which he left in the spring of the year 1800, for the purpose of accompanying a young friend of his own age, Lord Westport, and his tutor, on a tour in Ireland. This chapter of his Autobiography he has headed with 'I enter the world;' and as the period of this excursion coincided with that period of life when the boy is passing into the youth, and when it requires but the influence of society, and especially female society, to arouse in him the first faint consciousness of coming manhood, we doubt not that the summer of this year did constitute an epoch in De Quincey's life which justifies the title conferred upon it. He arrived in Dublin in the month of June, and was present at the final act of the old Irish Parliament, namely, its sitting to hear the Royal assent to Bills of the last Session read out; among which the Bill for the Union was included. He has recorded his impressions of this event in a very interesting passage, and especially his surprise at the absence of any loud demonstrations of public feeling either within or without Parliament. On leaving Dublin he passed three months at the seat of Lord Altamont,* Lord Westport's father, in the county of Mayo, where he visited all the scenes of the later Irish Rebellion under Humbert, of which, as well as of the earlier rising in the same year, he has left a most animated and concise account. He returned to England in the month of October, and on board the packet made acquaintance with a young lady, the sister of Lady Errol, who inspired him with his * Afterwards Marquis of Sligo. |