Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest _Blackwood_ staff (in that respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was the older as well as the more important man of the two, and there is the additional reason for postponing the founder of _Fraser_, that this latter periodical introduced a fresh flight of birds of passage (as journalists both fortunate and unfortunate may peculiarly be called) to English literature. De Quincey was born in 1785 (the same year as his friend Wilson) at Manchester, where his father was a merchant of means. He was educated at the Grammar School of his native town, after some preliminary teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother had moved after his father's death. He did not like Manchester, and when he had nearly served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, he ran away and hid himself. He went to Oxford after all, entering at Worcester, where he made a long though rather intermittent residence, but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his abode at Grasmere, married after a time, and lived there, at least as his headquarters, for more than twenty years. In 1830 he moved to Edinburgh, where, or in its neighbourhood, he resided for the rest of his long life, and where he died in December 1859. He has given various autobiographic handlings of this life--in the main it would seem quite trustworthy, but invested with an air of fantastic unreality by his manner of relation. His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of his voluminous published work, have in all probability taken colour in the general thought from his first literary work of any consequence, the wonderful _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, which, with the _Essays of Elia_, were the chief flowers of the _London Magazine_, and appeared in that periodical during the year 1821. He had acquired this habit during his sojourn at Oxford, and it had grown upon him during his at first solitary residence at the Lakes to an enormous extent. Until he thus committed the results of his dreams, or of his fancy and literary genius working on his dreams, or of his fancy and genius by themselves, to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth year, he had been, though a great reader, hardly anything of a writer. But thenceforward, and especially after, in 1825, he had visited his Lake neighbour Wilson at Edinburgh, and had been by him introduced to _Blackwood_, he became a frequent contributor to different magazines, and continued to be so, writing far more even than he published, till his death. He wrote very few books, the chief being a very free translation of a German novel, forged as Scott's, and called _Walladmor_; a more original and stable, though not very brilliant, effort in fiction, entitled _Klosterheim_; and the _Logic of Political Economy_. Towards the end of his life he superintended an English collection--there had already been one in America--of his essays, and this has been supplemented more than once since.