Some portions of this Introduction have been taken from the Athenæum Press Selections from De Quincey ; many of the notes have also been transferred from that volume. A number of the new notes I owe to a review of the Selections by Dr. Lane Cooper, of Cornell University. I wish also to thank for many favors the Committee and officers of the Glasgow University Library. If a word by way of suggestion to teachers be pertinent, I would venture to remark that the object of the teacher of literature i

Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785. His father was a man of high character and great taste for literature as well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately, when Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the family removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country place near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years a widow, removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there. Thomas, the fu

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer, at that time M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, [Footnote: " The same thing ":—Thus, in the calendar of the Church Festivals

What is to be taken as the predominant opinion of man, reflective and philosophic, upon SUDDEN DEATH? It is remarkable that, in different conditions of society, sudden death has been variously regarded as the consummation of an earthly career most fervently to be desired, or, again, as that consummation which is with most horror to be deprecated. Cæsar the Dictator, at his last dinner-party ( coena ), on the very evening before his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly career were numbe

Tumultuosissimamente Passion of sudden death! that once in youth I read and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs [Footnote: " Averted signs ":—I read the course and changes of the lady's agony in the succession of her involuntary gestures; but it must be remembered that I read all this from the rear, never once catching the lady's full face, and even her profile imperfectly.]!—rapture of panic taking the shape (which amongst tombs in churches I have seen) of woman bursting her sepulch

[Footnote: " Arc ":—Modern France, that should know a great deal better than myself, insists that the name is not D'Arc— i.e. , of Arc—but Darc . Now it happens sometimes that, if a person whose position guarantees his access to the best information will content himself with gloomy dogmatism, striking the table with his fist, and saying in a terrific voice, "It is so, and there's an end of it," one bows deferentially, and submits. But, if, unhappily for himself, won by this docility, he relents

"In October 1849 there appeared in Blackwood's Magazine an article entitled The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion . There was no intimation that it was to be continued; but in December 1849 there followed in the same magazine an article in two sections, headed by a paragraph explaining that it was by the author of the previous article in the October number, and was to be taken in connexion with that article. One of the sections of this second article was entitled The Vision of Sudden De