[1] _Autobiographic Sketches_, Chap. I.

[2] _Ibid._

[3] _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, Part II.

[4] _De Quincey_ (_English Men of Letters_), David Masson, p. 110.




HOW TO READ DE QUINCEY.

"De Quincey's sixteen volumes of magazine articles are
full of brain from beginning to end. At the rate of
about half a volume a day, they would serve for a
month's reading, and a month continuously might be
worse expended. There are few courses of reading from
which a young man of good natural intelligence would
come away more instructed, charmed, and stimulated, or,
to express the matter as definitely as possible, with
his mind more _stretched_. Good natural intelligence, a
certain fineness of fibre, and some amount of scholarly
education, have to be presupposed, indeed, in all
readers of De Quincey. But, even for the fittest
readers, a month's complete and continuous course of De
Quincey would be too much. Better have him on the
shelf, and take down a volume at intervals for one or
two of the articles to which there may be an immediate