Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/118

Rh logician by instinct and culture, a student by choice, a scholar by right of conquest of the stores of many minds, a writer of English of the first quality by dint of native command of language and life-long study and practice. His style, full and flexible, pure and polished, is peculiarly his own ; yet it is not the style of a mannerist, its charm is, so to speak, latent ; the form never obtrudes ; the secret is only discoverable by analysis and study. It consists simply in the reader s assurance of the writer s com plete mastery over all the infinite applicability and re sources of the English language. Hence involutions and parentheses, &quot; cycle on epicyle,&quot; evolve themselves into a stately clearness and harmony ; and sentences and paragraphs, loaded with suggestion, roll on smoothly and musically, without either fatiguing or cloying rather, indeed, to the surprise as well as delight of the reader ; for De Quincey is always ready to indulge in feats of style, witching the world with that sort of noble horsemanship which is as graceful as it is daring.

It has been complained that, in spite of the apparently full confidences of the Confessions and Autobiographic Sketches, readers are left in comparative ignorance, biographically speaking, of the man De Quincey. Two passages in his Confessions afford sufficient clues to this mystery. In one he describes himself &quot;as framed for love and all gentle affections,&quot; and in another confesses to the &quot;besetting infirmity&quot; of being &quot;too much of an eudae- monist.&quot; &quot; I hanker,&quot; he says, &quot; too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others ; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little capable of surmounting present pain for the sake of any recessionary benefit.&quot; His sensi tive disposition dictated the ignoring in his writings of traits merely personal to himself, as well as his ever-recurrent resort to opium as a doorway of escape from present ill ; and prompted those habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris, there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. Long indulgence in seclusion, and in habits of study the most lawless possible in respect of regular hours or any considerations of health or comfort, the habit of working as pleased himself without regard to the divisions of night or day, of times of sleeping or waking, even of the slow procession of the seasons, had latterly so disinclined him to the restraints, however slight, of ordinary social intercourse, that he very seldom submitted to them. On such rare occasions, however, as he did appear, perhaps at some simple meal with a favoured friend, or in later years in his own small but refined domestic circle, he was the most charming of guests, hosts, or companions. A short and fragile, but well-proportioned frame; a shapely and compact head ; a face beaming with intellectual light, with rare, almost feminine beauty of feature and complexion; a fascinating courtesy of manner ; and a fulness, swiftness, and elegance of silvery speech, such was the irresistible &quot; mortal mixture of earth s mould &quot; that men named De Quincey. He possessed in a high degree what the American poet Lowell calls &quot; the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere persuasive, and nowhere emphatic ; &quot; and his whole aspect and manner exercised an undefinable attraction over every one, gentle or simple, who came within its in fluence ; for shy as he was, he was never rudely shy, making goo 1 his boast that he had always made it his &quot; pride to converse familiarly more socratico with all human beings man, woman, and child &quot; looking on himself as a catholic creature standing in an equal relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated. He would converse with a peasant lad or a servant girl in phrase as choice, and sentences as sweetly turned, as if his interlocutor were his equal both in position and intelligence; yet with out a suspicion of pedantry, and with such complete adaptation of style and topic that his talk charmed the humblest as it did the highest that listened to it. His conversation was not a monologue ; if he had the larger share, it was simply because his hearers were only too glad that it should be so ; he would listen with something like deference to very ordinary talk, as if the mere fact of the speaker being one of the same company entitled him to all consideration and respect. The natural bent of his mind and disposition, and his life-long devotion to letters, to say nothing of his opium eating, rendered him, it must be allowed, regardless of ordinary obligations in life domestic and pecuniary to a degree that would have been not only culpable, but very highly so, in any less singularly con stituted mind. It was impossible to deal with or judge De Quincey by ordinary standards not even his publishers did so. Much no doubt was forgiven him, but all that needed forgiveness and, after all, his sins were rather of omission than commission, trivial rather than heinous, trying rather than deadly will soon be covered by the kindly oblivious veil of lapsing time, while his merits as a master in English literature will remain to be gratefully acknowledged.

A collection of De Quincey's works was published by James Hogg and Sons, Edinburgh, in 14 volumes, 1856-1860; and the same edition was republished by A. & C. Black, Edinburgh, with alterations and additions, in 16 volumes, 1862-1871. An American edition, issued by Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1859-1868, extends to 20 disconnected volumes. A biography in two volumes, by H. A. Page, Thomas De Quincey, his Life and Writings, has been published by John Hogg and Co., London, 1877.

 DERÁ GHÁZI KHÁN, a district of British India, in the Derajat division of the lieutenant-governorship of the Punjab, is situated between 28° 27′ 0″; and 31° 1′ 0″ N. lat. and 69° 36′ 30” and 70° 58′ 20″ E. long. It is bounded on the N. by Derá Ismáil Khán, on the E. by the Indus, on the S. by Jacobabad in Sind, and on the W. by the SuUiman range of hills. The district is a long narrow strip of country, 198 miles in length, sloping gradually from the hills which form its western boundary to the River Indus on the east. Below the hills the country is high and arid, generally level, but sometimes rolling in sandy undulations, and much intersected by hill torrents, 201 in number. With the exception of two, these streams dry up after the rains, and their influence is only felt for a few miles below the hills. The eastern portion of the district is at a level sufficiently low to benefit by the floods of the Indus. A barren tract intervenes between these zones, and is beyond the reach of the hill streams on the one hand and of the Indus on the other. Although liable to great extremes of temperature, and to a very scanty rainfall, the district is not unhealthy. The rainfall in 1872-73 was 7·7 inches; the mean temperature 79 Fahr. The maximum temperature (112°) occurred in June, the minimum (40°) in December. The principal agricultural products are wheat, great millet, jodr, cotton, rice, and indigo. The poppy plant is also rather extensively culti vated in the south of the district. The less important food grains are barley, spiked millet (bdjra), and pulses. Oil seeds and tobacco are also grown to a small extent.