The "English Opium-eater" himself told publicly, throughout a period of between thirty and forty years, whatever is known about him to any body; and in sketching the events of his life, the recorder has little more to do than to indicate facts which may be found fully expanded in Mr. De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-eater" and "Autobiographic Sketches." The business which he, in fact, left for others to do is that which, in spite of obvious impossibility, he was incessantly endeavoring to do himself--that of analyzing and forming a representation and judgment of his mind, and of his life as molded by his mind. The most intense metaphysician of a time remarkable for the predominance of metaphysical modes of thought, he was as completely unaware, as smaller men of his mental habits, that in his perpetual self-study and analysis he was never approaching the truth, for the simple reason that he was not even within ken of the necessary point of view. "I," he says, "whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little." And the description was a true one, as far as it went. And the completion of the description was one which he could never have himself arrived at. It must, we think, be concluded of De Quincey that he was the most remarkable instance in his time of a more than abnormal, of an artificial, condition of body and mind--a characterization which he must necessarily be the last man to conceive of. To understand this, it is necessary to glance at the events of his life. The briefest notice will suffice, as they are within the reach of all, as related in his own books.