No one, perhaps, has suffered so much from ill-judging admirers as De Quincey. If ever an author needed a judicious adviser, when preparing his works for publication in a permanent form, and a judicious editor, when the time had come for that final edition on which his title to future fame should rest, it was the English opium-eater. But, unhappily, he had no such adviser in his lifetime, and he has had no such editor since. He consequently reprinted much which ought never to have been reprinted at all, and he omitted to reprint some things which would have done honour to him. His besetting faults, even in his vigour, were loquacity and silliness, a habit of “drawing out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument”--a tendency to peddle and dawdle, as well as to indulge in a sort of pleasantry, so attenuated as to border closely on inanity. As he grew older these habits became more confirmed. His puerility and garrulousness in his later writings are often intolerable. But this was not the worst. In revising some of his earlier papers, and particularly the _Confessions_, he not only imported into them tiresome irrelevancies and superfluities, but, in emending, ruined the glorious passages on which his fame as a rhetorician and prose poet rests; such has been the fate, among others, of the exquisite description of the powers of opium,--the superb passage beginning, “The town of L.. represented the earth with its sorrows and its graves,”[27] and of the dreams in the second part of the _Confessions_, particularly of the sublime one beginning, “The dream commenced with a music.”[28]