sician, lawyer and critic, scholar and essayist, biographer and poet, has sympathies alive to many forms of thought, and has probably a more accurate and systematic knowledge of the writings of De Quincey than any other student of his multifarious productions. Dr. Stirling is a thinker of complete culture, who has no living rival as an expositor of the fecund metaphysic of Germany; and few compeers in the might of controversial skill in matters pertaining to science, morals, criticism, and religious philosophy. We rejoice in their friendliness to our designs for the culture of thought, and congratulate our readers on the possession of the able papers which these gentlemen have contributed to these pages. Of the other contributions of the same class we may safely say they exhibit that rare expository skill and fertility of suggestiveness which have made their author a welcome guest-friend to many an eager student and toiling thinker. In this department, then, we may regard it as indisputable that we have not now to acknowledge any falling off-but quite the contrary-notwithstanding the waymarks of time, which speak of the “ 'years which bring the philosophic mind."

In the other departments of their labours the conductors may note the freshness, originality, and excellence of the contributions to the Essayist, the vigour and interest of Toiling Upward, and the variousness as well as instructiveness of the Reviewer and the Inquirer. On a careful perusal of the volume now put into the reader's hands, the conductors believe that it will be found to be at once instructive, pleasant, and profitable; and such as to warrant the favourable opinion, not of friends only, but of critics in general.

The path of the truth-seeker is usually an unpopular one, beset with difficulties, and not often rewarded with high encouragement or loud congratulations; but it offers the consolations which are never denied to a noble spirit and an earnest endeavour. The conductors have not found it necessary to have strong cravings for popularity, and have preferred dutifulness to enrichment.

They aimed at influence, and disregarded affluence; they have exercised self-denial as well as advised self-devotedness. They have laboured to gain high ends, but not with the greed of high gains as their end; and the constantly recurring sacrifices of ease, pleasure, capital, and mental effort which the sacred servitude in which they had involved themselves demanded, they have given with patient grudgelessness, though the unseen harvest of their efforts could neither be estimated nor enjoyed by them. They have themselves exercised the earnest persistency they have sought to excite in others, and they have endured their own share of the contradiction of fate and time and circumstance, against which they have essayed to embolden others.

The conductors have earned, they believe, a moral right to the confidence and favour of those who have watched their efforts and found good in their toil, and they think they are warranted in asking them to use such endeavours as they can or may to add to the number of those who are brought under the influence of educative impulse, thoughtful effort, and a noble trust in the ultimate triumph of truth, by inducing to enrol themselves among the subscribers of and the contributors to the British Controversialist and magazine of literature, thought, and self-culture.

THE

BRITISH CONTROVERSIALIST.

Many-sided Minds.

THE LATE THOMAS DE QUINCEY,

THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER

(Scholar, Philosopher, Theologian, Economist, Humorist,
Romancer, Historian, Biographer, and Critic).

BY C. M. INGLEBY, M.A., LL.D.

"O genius of good sense, keep any child of mine from ever sacrificing his intellectual health to such a life of showy emptiness, of pretence, of noise, and of words."-De Quincey.

THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH, one of the wittiest and wisest of his cloth, addressing an assembly of students, gave them this advice:

"There is a piece of foppery which is to be cautiously guarded against, the foppery of universality-of knowing all sciences, and excelling in all arts, chemistry, algebra, mathematics, dancing, history, reasoning, riding, fencing, low Dutch, high Dutch, and natural philosophy! In short, the modern precept of education very often is, 'Take the Admirable Crichton for your model: I would have you ignorant of nothing.' Now my advice, on the contrary, is, to have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order that you may avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything."

Very similar to this is the counsel of Hegel (quoted by Dr. J. H. Stirling, at the end of an admirable article contributed by him to the Fortnightly Review, October 1, 1867 :

"He who wills something great must, as Goethe says, know how to restrict himself. He who, on the other hand, wills all, wills in effect nothing, and brings it to nothing. There is a number of interesting things in the world: Spanish, poetry, chemistry, politics, music; this is all very interesting, and we cannot take it ill of any one who occupies himself with these. In order, however, as an individual in a prescribed position, to bring 1870.

B

something about, he must hold by what is definite, and not split up his strength in many ""* directions."

Even Hegel was-perhaps not contentedly-ignorant of the physico-mathematics; and it is a remarkable instance of the large demand which philosophy makes upon human knowledge, that this ignorance was detrimental to his philosophy in its ultimate issues, and fatal to its reception in England.

Good as this advice is, it does not necessarily follow that its neglect is fatal to success in life. Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt (to which roll might well be added the living Helmholtz), and many other Germans, are proofs to the contrary-all of whom not only achieved the most distinguished success in their several specialities, but rendered their names historical. With Englishmen and Frenchmen the case is somewhat different. The names of Frederick Schlegel, Brougham, Whewell, and Michelet, occur to me as instances of the sort of success attainable by those who have made the Admirable Crichton their model. A few of those who dare to attempt to know everything may, notwithstanding such unwise temerity, attain to considerable eminence; but their names are never found in the first rank. With men of less mental and bodily strength the attempt is simply fatal. The physique of Brougham and Whewell was of extraordinary tenacity, and their atural abilities were excellent, insomuch that it is difficult to say to what perfection and power of intellect they might not have reached, had each devoted himself to the cultivation of a single set of faculties, or to the acquisition of a single branch of knowledge. Virgil's advice to the vine-grower (in which he reiterates the counsel of Hesiod) may be figuratively applied to the student :"Laudato ingentia rura,

Exiguum colito :"

i. e., admire large vineyards, but cultivate a small one. Equivalent to the counsel of Sydney Smith, Hegel, Buffier, Hesiod, and Virgil, 18 the old proverb,-" Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well,' for few indeed have the mental endowments and physical endurance Lecessary to the attainment of great excellence in many distinct subjects of study. Since the establishment of the Classical Tripos at Cambridge, it has never once happened that the Senior Classic had been Senior Wrangler. The nearest approach to this occurred in the year 1835 (which was what is called a weak mathematical year), when Mr. Goulburn, the only and highly gifted son of the late exChancellor of the Exchequer, was Second Wrangler and Senior Classic; and he paid for this double honour with his life.

The application, however, of the above-quoted maxim varies with different orders of mental endowments. The subject of this

Compare with the above the Second Proposition in Père Buffier's "Examen des Préjugés Vulgaires," "Que la science ne consiste point à tavoir beaucoup" (That science does not consist in knowing much).

sketch was fond of subtilizing (as he and Tennyson call it), and his favourite distinctions were between imagination and fancy, between power and knowledge, and between genius and talent.

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'Walking Stewart," says De Quincey, was a man of very extraordinary genius;" but he was utterly devoid of talent, and, as a natural result, produced nothing. Many years ago, I knew a gentleman named James Arthur Davies, who might well have been called "the admirable Davies." He appeared to me to possess every conceivable talent, and, up to the limits of his brain-power, to have turned all his talents to account; but, as I surmise, for want of some touch of true genius, he produced nothing, and did not achieve even a moderate success in life.*

Now to the man of genius, with or without these special gifts, and to the man of many talents, with or without some touch of the Promethean fire, the foregoing protest against versatility in mental culture must not be taken too literally; for there are cases in which an exemption may be claimed. The subject of this paper was, in the best sense, a man of genius, and possessed all the talents requisite and sufficient for the accomplished philosopher. Metaphysics was his hobby, and the work which he constantly kept before him, as the one thing for him to do, was a treatise De Emendatione Humani Intellectus; yet that book was never written, perhaps not attempted. The bent and powers of his mind carried him to philosophy, and his early training had thoroughly fitted him for the study of any philosophical works in Latin, Greek, or German. He read Plato with appreciation, and subsequently applied himself to the mastery of Kant's Critic of Pure Reason. His various notices, both of Kant and of his philosophy, are hopelessly discrepant. In one place he brands Kant as a liar, and in another calls him "the most sincere, honourable, and truthful of human beings." At one time he imputes Atheism to Kant, and at another he conceded to him the character of a Christian; and his remarks on the philosophy are equally contradictory. The key to all this is easily found. De Quincey wrote flippantly and dogmatically on these subjects before he had acquired any real acquaintance with them

*After Davies' death his MSS. were placed at my disposal. They weighed almost exactly a hundredweight: and they may fairly be described as de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. My first examination of them revealed such versatility of talent, painstaking industry, and wide erudition, that I was prepared for the discovery of some works of the highest value. Something like half of the MSS. were written in Latin, a language which Davies spoke fluently; but I also found in them a good sprinkling of Greek and Hebrew, as well as French, German, and Italian. Of the last language Davies had acquired the most perfect mastery; but he ordinarily conversed in English or French. My expectation was disappointed. The MSS. proved to be little more than digested collections. A few original pieces in which he appeared to have worked wholly on his own mental resources were but elaborate failures. I have arranged seven volumes of his Lectures and Treatises on Music for presentation to his and my college-Trinity College, Cambridge.

at first hand. Having once devoted himself to the study of the "Critic," his remarks are just and genial. Henceforth he proclaimed this book to be the Alpha and Omega of philosophy, and hurled great scorn at the troop of unhappy impostors who had hitherto encumbered with their help such English students as dreamed of cracking this huge cocoa-nut. And that was all: no help in that direction was ever vouchsafed by De Quincey himself. We cannot be far wrong in attributing this unfortunate result to the fact that, instead of concentrating his faculties on some one subject, such as fiction, criticism, history, in any of which he might have taken the first rank, or on philosophy, the successful prosecution of which would have called into healthy action every faculty of his mind, he divided his forces, and lost the vantage of their cooperation. A glance at the tremendous index appended to the fifteenth volume of Messrs. Black's edition of his minor works is sufficient to show that philosophy necessarily shared the fate of all the other subjects which occupied his versatile mind, and about which he delighted to pour forth his voluble, but often most eloquent gossip.

Thomas Quincey, the father of the author, was a West Indian merchant, carrying on business in Market Street Lane, Manchester. All we know about him is, that he had four sons and four daughters: that, growing genteel, he declined the retail trade from the beginning of 1783, and that he died at Greenhays, Manchester, on July 11th, 1793. His son Thomas (the fourth child) was born at Greenhays, on August 15th, 1785. He was instructed in the rudiments of the classics by the Rev. Samuel Hall, Incumbent of St. Peter's. Three years after the death of his father, the widow removed with her family to Bath, and for the following three years "young Thomas" continued his education at the grammar school there, and at a private school in Wiltshire. He was then removed to the grammar school at Manchester, in the expectation of being able to obtain an exhibition for Oxford. Mr. Lawon, the head-master, placed him at once in the first class. The system pursued at this school was such that no boy of delicate health could conform to it without serious detriment to his constitution. To this cause De Quincey (as he called himself) attributed that fatal derangement of the stomach which first led to his having recourse to opium. Whatever may have been the effect of the school discipline on his bodily health, it is certain that to it he owed that mastery over Latin and Greek composition which, in early years, made him so great a name.

At the end of three years he would have been entitled to stand for an exhibition, and his pre-eminent classical attainments would have ensured his success; but his failing health, and the impatience and irritability resulting therefrom, rendered school restraints insufferable, so that in his eighteenth month he clandestinely left the town, and for two years abandoned himself to a wandering life, being found in Chester, North Wales, London, and other parts of