Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/396

 in 1857. In 1855 his second daughter went to India to marry Colonel Baird Smith. De Quincey, though incompetent to manage a household, was always an affectionate father and grandfather. He took a great part in the education of his sons. He was interested in passing affairs, and especially moved by the Indian mutiny, in which his son-in-law played a prominent part at the siege of Delhi. But a more characteristic peculiarity was his intense interest in trials for murder, especially in the cases of Palmer and Madeline Smith. His fame brought him many visitors, though his singular habits enveloped him in a certain mystery, and he had an aversion to the ordinary social formalities. No one, however, could be more essentially courteous, and his utter incapacity for practical life challenged tenderness rather than condemnation. Hill Burton tells of his painful attempts to raise a loan of 7s. 6d., when it turned out that he had a 50l. note in his pocket, which he was incompetent to negotiate. It required a stratagem to get him to a dinner party, though, when once started in society, he might remain indefinitely. When fairly roused he talked with an eloquence and fluency rivalling that of Coleridge, but never fell into the error of Coleridge and other great talkers by monopolising the conversation. His love of music provided his greatest enjoyment. He loved solitary, nocturnal rambles, sometimes, it is said, lying down to sleep under the next hedge. At home he was charming, though frequently alarming his children by setting his hair on fire during his readings. He became gradually weaker for the last two years of his life, and finally sank on 8 Dec. 1859, carefully attended to the last by Miss Stark and his unmarried daughter. He was buried in the West Churchyard of Edinburgh. De Quincey had five sons: William, died 1835; Horace, who became an officer in the 26th Cameronians, served under Sir Hugh Gough in China, and died there in 1842; Francis, who became a physician, emigrated to Brazil, and died of yellow fever in 1861; Paul Frederick, who became an officer in the 70th regiment, served at Sobraon, and through the mutiny, was made brigade-major by Lord Strathnairn, and ultimately settled in New Zealand; and Julius, who died in 1833. He had three daughters: Margaret, who married Robert Craig, and died in 1871; Florence, who married Colonel Baird Smith, who died in India in 1861; and Emily, unmarried.

A ‘medical view’ of De Quincey's case by Dr. Eatwell, appended to Page's life (vol. ii. 309–39), gives an interesting investigation, tending to show that his opium-eating was due to his sufferings from ‘gastrodynia,’ and that opium was the sole efficient means of controlling the disease.

There is a curious parallel between the careers of Coleridge and De Quincey. De Quincey was profoundly influenced by the school of which Coleridge was a leader; he shared many of their prejudices or principles, and especially their revolt against the philosophical and literary principles dominant in the eighteenth century. While Coleridge and Wordsworth aimed at a poetical reformation, De Quincey tried to restore the traditions of the great prose writers of the seventeenth century, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, and their contemporaries. His fine musical ear and rich imagination enabled him to succeed so far as to become one of the great masters of English in what he calls (preface to collected works) the ‘department of impassioned prose.’ In the visionary dreamland which is his peculiar domain he is unrivalled; and his stately rhetoric is also the fitting embodiment of a tender and delicate sentiment, often blended with real pathos, and at times lighted up by genuine humour. The ‘Confessions,’ the ‘Suspiria,’ and essays in the same line elsewhere are the work by which he will be permanently known. He clearly possessed, also, an intellect of singular subtlety. He never rivalled Coleridge by stimulating philosophical inquiry, and the degree of his metaphysical powers must be matter of conjecture; but he showed great power in the economical investigations which Coleridge despised. In the ‘Templars' Dialogues’ and the ‘Logic of Political Economy’ he appears chiefly as an expounder of Ricardo. J. S. Mill speaks of him with great respect, and adopts some of his illustrations of the theory of value (Political Economy, bk. iii. chs. i. ii.). He says, however, that De Quincey entirely fails to recognise one important principle. Mr. Shadworth Hodgson (Outcast Essays, 69–98) defends De Quincey and charges Mill with confusion. Mill's criticism appears to be well founded, but Mr. Hodgson's argument deserves careful consideration. De Quincey's infirmities caused many blemishes in his work; many articles are fragmentary; his reading, though wide, was desultory; he is often intolerably long-winded and discursive, and delights too much in logical wire-drawing; his reason is too often the slave of effeminate prejudices, and the humour with which he endeavours to relieve his stately passages is too often forced and strongly wanting in taste. But imperfect as is much of his work, he has left many writings which, in their special variety of excellence, are unrivalled in modern English.