“The poet’s figure was short and full, and his voice had a low, veiled tone habitually in it, which made it sometimes difficult to hear distinctly what he was saying. When he spoke in conversation, he liked to be very near his listener, and thus stand, as it were, on confidential grounds with him. His turn of thought was apt to be cheerful among his friends, and he entered readily into a vein of wit and nimble expression. Verbal facility seemed natural to him, and his epithets, evidently unprepared, were always perfect. He disliked cant and hard ways of judging character. He praised easily. He impressed every one who came near him as a born gentleman, chivalrous and generous in a high degree.” THOMAS DE QUINCEY 1786-1859 [Sidenote: Masson’s _de Quincey_.] “In addition to the general impression of his diminutiveness and fragility, one was struck with the peculiar beauty of his head and forehead, rising disproportionately high over his small, wrinkly visage and gentle, deep-set eyes. His talk was in the form of really harmonious and considerate colloquy, and not at all in that of monologue.... That evening passed, and though I saw him once or twice again, it is the last sight I remember best. It must have been, I think, in 1846, on a summer afternoon. A friend, a stranger in Edinburgh, was walking with me in one of the pleasant, quiet, country lanes near Edinburgh. Meeting us, and the sole living thing in the lane beside ourselves, came a small figure, not untidily dressed, but with his hat pushed far up in front of his forehead, and hanging on his hindhead, so that the back rim must have been resting on his coat-collar. At a little distance I recognised it to be De Quincey; but, not considering myself entitled to interrupt his meditations, I only whispered the information to my friend, that he might not miss what the look at such a celebrity was worth. So we passed him, giving him the wall. Not unnaturally, however, after we passed, we turned round for the pleasure of a back view of the wee, intellectual wizard. Whether my whisper and our glance had alarmed him, as a ticket-of-leave man might be rendered uneasy in his solitary walk by the scrutiny of two passing strangers, or whether he had some recollection of me (which was likely enough, as he seemed to forget nothing), I do not know, but we found that he, too, had stopped, and was looking round at us. Apparently scared at being caught doing so, he immediately wheeled round again, and hurried his face towards a side-turning in the lane, into which he disappeared, his hat still hanging on the back of his head. That was my last sight of De Quincey.”--1846. [Sidenote: Page’s _de Quincey_.]