Life.-Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. Being a precocious child, he became a remarkable student at the age of eight. When he was only eleven, his Latin verses were the envy of the older boys at the Bath school, which he was then attending. At the age of fifteen, he was so thoroughly versed in Greek that his professor said of him to a friend: "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." De Quincey was sent in this year to the Manchester grammar school; but his mind was in advance of the instruction offered there, and he unceremoniously left the school on his seventeenth birthday. For a time he tramped through Wales, living on an allowance of a guinea a week. Hungering for books, he suddenly posted to London. As he feared that his family would force him to return to school, he did not let them know his whereabouts. He therefore received no money from them, and was forced to wander hungry, sick, and destitute, through the streets of the metropolis, with its outcasts and waifs. He describes this part of his life in a very entertaining manner in his _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_. When his family found him, a year later, they prevailed on him to go to Oxford; and, for the next four years, he lived the life of a recluse at college. In 1808 he took the cottage at Grasmere that Wordsworth had quitted, and enjoyed the society of the three Lake poets. Here De Quincey married and lived his happiest years. The latter part of his life was clouded by his indulgence in opium, which he had first taken while at college to relieve acute neuralgia. At one time he was in the habit of taking an almost incredible amount of laudanum. Owing to a business failure, his money was lost. It then became necessary for him to throw off the influence of the narcotic sufficiently to earn a livelihood, In 1821 he began to write. From that time until his death, in 1859, his life was devoted mainly to literature. [Illustration: ROOM IN DOVE COTTAGE OCCUPIED BY WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, AND DE QUINCEY.] Works.--Nearly all De Quincey's writings were contributed to magazines. His first and greatest contribution was _The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, published in the _London Magazine_. These _Confessions_ are most remarkable for the brilliant and elaborate style in which the author's early life and his opium dreams are related. His splendid, yet melancholy, dreams are the most famous in the language. De Quincey's wide reading, especially of history, supplied the material for many of them. In these dreams he saw the court ladies of the "unhappy times of Charles I.," witnessed Marius pass by with his Roman legions, "ran into pagodas" in China, where he "was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms," and "was buried for a thousand years, in stone coffins, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids" in Egypt.