Produced by Anne Soulard, Arno Peters, Tiffany Vergon and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES. BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY SELECTIONS, GRAVE AND GAY, FROM WRITINGS PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED, BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY MR. DE QUINCEY TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF THIS WORKS. Lasswade, _January 8_, 1853 MY DEAR SIR: I am on the point of revising and considerably altering, for republication in England, an edition of such amongst my writings as it may seem proper deliberately to avow. Not that I have any intention, or consciously any reason, expressly to disown any one thing that I have ever published; but some things have sufficiently accomplished their purpose when they have met the call of that particular transient occasion in which they arose; and others, it may be thought on review, might as well have been suppressed from the very first. Things immoral would of course fall within that category; of these, however, I cannot reproach myself with ever having published so much as one. But even pure levities, simply _as_ such, and without liability to any worse objection, may happen to have no justifying principle of life within them; and if, any where, I find such a reproach to lie against a paper of mine, that paper I should wish to cancel. So that, upon the whole, my new and revised edition is likely to differ by very considerable changes from the original papers; and, consequently, to that extent is likely to differ from your existing Boston reprint.