We have a right eagerly to ask: On this strongly marked temperament, so delicately imaginative and so keenly logical, so receptive and so retentive, a type alike of the philosopher and the poet, the scholar and the musician--on such a contemplative genius, what were the effects of so great and so constant indulgence in a drug noted for its power of heightening and extending, for a season, the whole range of the imaginative faculties? Justifiable as such feelings may be, however, they tend to wrong De Quincey's memory and to limit our conceptions of his character and genius. He was no vulgar opium drunkard; he was, to all appearances, singularly free even from the petty vices to which eaters of the drug are supposed to be peculiarly liable. To be sure, he was not without his eccentricities. He was absent-mindedly careless in his attire, unusual in his hours of waking and sleeping, odd in his habits of work, ludicrously ignorant of the value of money, solitary, prone to whims, by turns reticent and loquacious. But for all his eccentricities, De Quincey--unlike Poe, for example--is not a possible object for pity or patronage; they would be foolish who could doubt his word or mistrust his motives. He was "queer," as most great Englishmen of letters of his time were; but the more his at first enigmatic character comes to light, through his own letters and through the recollections of his friends, the more clearly do we see him to have been a pure-minded and well-bred man, kind, honest, generous, and gentle. His life was almost wholly passed among books,--books in many languages, books of many kinds and times. These he incessantly read and annotated. And the treasures of this wide reading, stored in a retentive and imaginative mind, form the basis of almost all his work that is not distinctly autobiographical.