26. THOMAS DE QUINCEY (+1785-1859+), one of our most brilliant essayists, was born at Greenhays, Manchester, in the year 1785. He was educated at the Manchester grammar-school and at Worcester College, Oxford. While at Oxford he took little share in the regular studies of his college, but read enormous numbers of Greek, Latin, and English books, as his taste or whim suggested. He knew no one; he hardly knew his own tutor. “For the first two years of my residence in Oxford,” he says, “I compute that I did not utter one hundred words.” After leaving Oxford, he lived for about twenty years in the Lake country; and there he became acquainted with Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge (the son of S. T. Coleridge), and John Wilson (afterwards known as Professor Wilson, and also as the “Christopher North” of ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’). Suffering from repeated attacks of neuralgia, he gradually formed the habit of taking laudanum; and by the time he had reached the age of thirty, he drank about 8000 drops a-day. This unfortunate habit injured his powers of work and weakened his will. In spite of it, however, he wrote many hundreds of essays and articles in reviews and magazines. In the latter part of his life, he lived either near or in Edinburgh, and was always employed in dreaming (the opium increased his power both of dreaming and of musing), or in studying or writing. He died in Edinburgh in the year 1859. --Many of his essays were written under the signature of “The English Opium-Eater.” Probably his best works are +The Confessions of an Opium-Eater+ and +The Vision of Sudden Death+. The chief characteristics of his style are majestic rhythm and elaborate eloquence. Some of his sentences are almost as long and as sustained as those of Jeremy Taylor; while, in many passages of reasoning that glows and brightens with strong passion and emotion, he is not inferior to Burke. He possessed an enormous vocabulary-- in wealth of words and phrases he surpasses both Macaulay and Carlyle; and he makes a very large-- perhaps even an excessive-- use of Latin words. He is also very fond of using metaphors, personifications, and other figures of speech. It may be said without exaggeration that, next to Carlyle’s, De Quincey’s style is the most stimulating and inspiriting that a young reader can find among modern writers.