various magazines. He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh
and its suburb, Lasswade, where the remainder of his life was spent.
_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ and its rival _Tatt's Magazine_
received a large number of contributions. _The English Mail-Coach_
appeared in 1849 in Blackwood. _Joan of Arc_ had already been published
(1847) in _Tait_. De Quincey continued to drink laudanum throughout his
life,--twice after 1821 in very great excess. During his last years he
nearly completed a collected edition of his works. He died in Edinburgh
on the 8th of December, 1859.


II. CRITICAL REMARKS


The Opium-Eater had been a weak, lonely, and over-studious child, and
he was a solitary and ill-developed man. His character and his work
present strange contradictions. He is most precise in statement, yet
often very careless of fact; he is most courteous in manner, yet
inexcusably inconsiderate in his behavior. Again, he sets up a high
standard of purity of diction, yet uses slang quite unnecessarily and
inappropriately; and though a great master of style, he is guilty, at
times, of digression within digression until all trace of the original
subject is lost.

De Quincey divides his writings into three groups: first, that class
which "proposes primarily to amuse the reader, but which, in doing so,
may or may not happen occasionally to reach a higher station, at which
the amusement passes into an impassioned interest." To this class would
belong the _Autobiographic Sketches_ and the _Literary Reminiscences_.
As a second class he groups "those papers which address themselves