Thomas de Quincy has been well known during the last twenty years, not only as the author of “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”, but as a prominent contributor of able, thoughtful, and eloquent articles to Blackwood’s Magazine, and other British periodicals. The publishers of the present volume intend to follow it up with others, containing the best of his many remarkable historical, biographical, and critical papers. When completed, the series will constitute a body of thought which no student’s library can well be without, for the author’s learning extends over widely separated departments of literature and science, and in each he has proved himself capable of throwing out those suggestive thoughts which take root in the reader’s mind, and bear fruit. A resolute, inquisitive, and reflective student, richly dowered with understanding and imagination, and exercising great dominion over the harmonies and subtilties of expression, De Quincy has been prevented from producing little more than colossal fragments of thought, by the mastery obtained over his will by opium, and the contemptuousness of disposition which that habit provokes for calm, orderly, systematic works. He is dogmatic, negatively as well as positively. It is natural that a man who obtains glimpses of grand truths and magnificent systems, through artificial stimulants, should disdain the sober realizations of consecutive and industrious thought, wanting all that misty magnificence which clothes things viewed in the waking dreams of the opium eater. But egotist and dogmatist as he is, he is still a resolute thinker, whose mind, busy with all the problems of society and philosophy, is continually startling us with novel thoughts and splendid rhetoric.