mother and sister migrated to Manchester. While at school he got illwas treated by an apothecary-suffered much, and was nothing the better, but rather the worse. A ramble among the Caernarvonshire mountains would have saved him from great torments, and, perhaps, much injury, for about this time he began his opium habits.

He obtained some distinctions at school; and some of his noble friends came, partly for the purpose of patronising the school, partly with the wish to pay him a compliment by listening to him declaiming his Latin verses. The triumph was of short duration. We have said he had already commenced taking opium; we do not know how far his power of self-direction had ceased-how far he was to be regarded as an accountable agent at the time; but his folly was not greater in running away from his school, which he did, and for the wild mad world of London, than was that of his guardians in their arrangements for his education.

This part of the book is disappointing; for here ought to come in the episode of the "Opium-Eater's Confessions," which is, we suppose, reserved for a future volume, but which must be less effective, thus displaced from its proper position.

We next have him resident with his mother and a brother of hers, an officer from India, on leave of absence, at a place called the Priory, in the neighbourhood of Chester. The excitement and military enthusiasm of the country, on the threat of invasion from France, is well described. He got into some squabble with his uncle about De Foe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, which the young critic said was an unfair and superficial account of the Parliamen tary war. The uncle thought the remark, however just, somewhat impertinent, and asked him, with more good sense than good temper, "how he could consent to waste his time as he did?" De Quincey replied that he did so because his guardians would not give more for his use than his school allowance of £100 a-year. His uncle thought that sum might answer, and asked him would he undertake an Ox

ford life on such terms. "Most gladly," was the reply; and within a week

he entered that "time-honoured University."

We have again to complain of the interruptions and omissions of the narrative. A few dates of time would have greatly aided us in understanding this book. The "Confessions of an Opium-Eater" have great value, considered merely as a romance-as the creation of a man of genius, from some chaos of dreams, reduced into something of unity; but of infinitely more value would they be, if we were distinctly told, in such language as did not admit of doubtful interpretation, the precise facts of the case. It is provoking that at this very point we are given, instead of the expected narrative, a cluster of idle asterisks. In the same way, when we have every reason to expect an account of his Oxford life, we find all mention of it omitted. We look for the account with the expectation of learning much of the state of the university, which no reports of any royal commissioners could give, and of which it would not be easy to find a witness in every way so competent as our author. The account, if there ever was any account written of this part of his life, is omitted, and we pass on to his recollections of the lake country, where it would appear that he resided for a few years, forming acquaintanceship more or less intimate with the distinguished poets, Wordsworth and Southey. Of them and of Coleridge we have a good deal told none of it very new, still it is not uninteresting. The descriptions of the lake scenery, and of the state of society in the northern district of England some fifty years ago, is, we think, more true than his delineations of men, whom he seems to have at first regarded with eager and undistinguishing admiration, though afterwards he found this hero-worship rather wearisome. On this part of the work we cannot now enter. At some future time, perhaps, in connexion with Mr. De Quincey's work - more probably, however, in some detached papers on the subject we intend to say few words on the poets and poetry of England at the commencement of the present century.

VOL. XLIII.NO. CCLVI.

2 F

MANY people are beginning to think that there is nothing left on the face of the earth for a man to look for ;-that everything has been found.

It is natural enough that people should have this idea. It is only within the present century that the means of world-wide intercommunication have been fully opened up. The children of civilisation, taking advantage of the universal amity of nations, have now overrun the whole habitable-and uninhabitable globe. Wherever they have gone, they have taken care to look about them, and, in particular, to leave no stone unturned to elucidate the history and antiquities, as well as the natural characteristics and capabilities, of the various regions they have explored. The result has been that from every quarter we have been plied with wondrous intelligence east, west, north, and south, each has rendered up its secrets, till at last we fancy we have geographical reasons for the conclusion that we must be by this time in possession of all that the past can possibly have stored up and hid away for the use of posterity.

It is just as well, perhaps, that the mass of mankind is not given to reflection. Physically speaking, we are made for present interests and present purposes, and assume the functions of our betters when we become philosophers. Nevertheless, there is a vast deal going on outside the range of man's ordinary vision that he does not dream of: for instance, it does not occur to every body to reflect that, in almost every department of nature, there is a procession of things so slow as not to reveal itself except to careful and long-continued observation. Such is the motion of the solar system in space; such is the supposed refri geration of the earth's crust; such is the dying out of species; such, in man's history, is the growth, maturity, and decay of nations. And yet these are matters of vast importance, without reference to which no general conclusions should be drawn, upon any of the subjects they are conversant with.

Science, indeed, of necessity enters

into these extended considerations. Met as it is on all sides by systems, spreading out from this little globe of ours into immensity, like rays from a luminous point, it could not do otherwise; and science teaches us that man is himself a recent lodger here, occupying domains that had their own tenants countless ages before his organisation existed anywhere except in the prescient counsels of his Creator. The house he inhabits has been constructed out of the ruins of earlier dwellings, of which the inscribed stones may still be traced, built into the foundations of those he lives in. It teaches him, moreover, that all this is for the best, and that, so far as he can see, it could not have been so well in any other

way.

Now this, once it comes to be known, is admitted in science without question, for two reasons. First, because in science proofs can be pointed to. The admirable and systematic arrangement of the universe is the favourite theme with people who have got even a smattering of classified knowledge. To attempt to deny it, in fact, would be to draw ridicule upon oneself. Furthermore, there is nothing in the doctrine with which we have any personal concern; it makes nothing either for or against ourselves though there should be a Mädlerian centre of the universe, round which all the hosts of heaven whirl in an enormous eddy. We should be no greater or smaller, were we all at a stand-still. But when we come to religious or moral dispensations, the case is very dif ferent;-first of all, proofs are not so easy to be had there are a hundred ways of accounting for events without referring them to any ulterior design. Take, as an example, the condition of the Jewish nation at the present day. It will be found that nine people out of ten, if unimbued with religious influences, will endeavour to explain the phenomenon as an ordinary cir cumstance, or at least as an exceptional case that can be accounted for. In fact it does violence to one's first ideas of free-will to admit the direct

interference of a controlling power in man's actions at all; the idea is humiliating to his pride. He loves to stand upon truths which he can comprehend, and in a measure reduce within the sway of his own power; and just in proportion as he finds himself compelled along a track he has not marked out for himself, and does not see the end of, does he fret, and chafe, and refuse to be a consenting party.

In spite of him, however, and whether he chooses to open his eyes or shut them, great providential dispensations do hold their courses about him on every side. There is something grand, indeed, to the enlightened glance, in the tranquil indifference, as it might be called, with which these great wheels, whether in moral or inaterial nature, make their revolutions

"In the rapid and rushing river of time,"

regardless, seemingly, of human cognisance, disposed according to some higher law than human intelligence, and set in motion for more elevated purposes than human contemplation. Before the eye of man was created, the blue rays of Capella and the red light of Aldebaran shone down upon the earth. For an unknown period antecedent to man's first perception of them, the rings of Saturn, the manyformed clusters of the telescopic nebulæ, poured their splendour out into the waste places of the universe. Were the race of man to be swept away tomorrow, they would probably shine away as placidly as if he were still registering their minutest phenomena. And it is just the same in the moral world, in which events take the place of motions and purposes of laws. There, too, whether we choose to see it or not, the dispensation approaches, arrives, and goes, according to a determinate providential arrangement, the greater part of the orbit of which lies outside the limit of human observation. A few degrees of the great circle includes us; but enough is observed to enable the philosopher of Christianity to perceive that the rotation takes place according to a law.

The next step is, to recognise the meaning of all this. Not only do providential arrangements exist, but they emanate from a beneficent intelligence; they conduce to an end; we should be the worse if they did not exist.

This is to be gathered from various sources. Take that of geological discovery, for instance. The formidable contents of the sedimentary rocks, which entomb the races of the primæ val world, lay under the very feet of antiquity, which had only to dig to expose them. They did not discover them; or, rather, they looked upon them so unheedingly, that scarcely a trace of their having ever been come upon exists in ancient literature. Why was this? To us who live to-day, it seems impossible that the extraordinary, varied, and monstrous contents of the aqueous rocks of the globe could for an instant have failed to excite the interest and wonder of every observer. It may safely be assumed, then, that if antiquity was blind to what we now see, there was some providential reason for it; that the time was not come, in fact, when the secrets of the pre-Adamite world could be revealed with advantage. At various previous periods other sciences had made progress. Chaldean sages, and, before them, the Chinese, had studied and learned something of the stellar theory, chronicling, for the benefit of modern science, much which they did not themselves understand. The powers and virtues of herbs were discovered by the Thessalian enchanters, who, in seeking for charms or poisons, extracted latent virtues from the simples they culled, and ministered to human suffering what they designed for occult or barbarous purposes. Arabs pored over the properties and affinities of mineral substances, in quest of health, happiness, immortality, and gold, and extracted chemistry from the research. But while the stars were tracked round their orbits, and the vegetable world was travelled over from end to end, and the materials of our globe were submitted to minute analysis, no attempt was made to ascertain the order of successive strata, or the meaning of the fossil flora, so strangely analagous to the upper and living one, or the mystery of those huge skeletons which grinned on every side from the quarries out of which the materials for chemical investigations were procured, and in which they lay so thickly entombed. Surely there was design in this some withholding of man's natural inquisitiveness, until its exercise should be profitable, or at least innocuous. Let us suppose antiquity

taking hold upon the relics of the geologic periods: it had exhausted imagination for its gods; every hideous thought had in turn been embodied, deified, and worshipped. What a pantheon of ready-made idols was lurking in the lias under its feet! The eye is now familiar with the Dagon or fish-god of Assyria, the more fantastic dæmons of Etruria, the Vishnou of the Hindoo, the colossal chimeras of Egypt, the grotesque monoliths of Palenque and Copan, and the hideous Quexalcoatl of the Mexican. But is there one of these to be compared in its terrors to the gigantic dragon of the Dorsetshire lias, the Icthyosaurus, or the frightful winged lizard of the same period, the Pterodactyl, or the cumbrous Mastodon of the tertiary era? As much more startling would have been the effect of such phenomena upon the superstition of ignorance, as the monsters of nature exceed the bugbears of art. To have dug out a deity whole would have been to defy detection and silence scepticism. A goddess fabled to have descended from heaven, would have had no chance against a god known to have arisen out of the earth. No legend would have been too wild to have tacked on to such a demonstrable theogony. The things under the earth would have been bowed down to by an awe-struck world; and geology, as a science, might have been postponed to an indefinite period, if it had ever been able to shake itself clear of the trammels of early association.

But, by providential wisdom, the thickly-packed treasures of a primeval world lay quiet and undisturbed, sleeping through the whole night of heathenism and ignorance; and never stirred until religion the true religion, the religion of reason and wisdom as well as of revelation-was firmly implanted in man's breast, and the danger of the discoveries being turned to an account other than that of the glory of God and the good of man, had passed away for ever. Then, indeed, they heaved, and burst through the surface, imprisoned as they had been through successive revolutions that had convulsed the surface of our globe; they waited but the command of Providence to place themselves beneath the feet of Werner, and Cuvier, and Agassiz, who had only to stamp to make them appear.

This is very like design, it will be ad

mitted, and it is only an example of what has been manifested in many other instances besides this particular natural science. The discovery of printing was apparently postponed until Christianity had first taken a firm hold on mankind, and then been corrupted. The revival of learning immediately ensued, and this was followed up by centuries of investigation into the written treasures of the past, which had lain so long unnoticed and unknown, waiting their time. It might now be safely permitted, in short, to mankind to make use of his reason in investigations of this kind without danger to his faith, which the same developments had matured, strengthened, and confirmed, so as to render it impregnable to the assaults of scepticism.

Now, therefore--literary antiquity having been, according to the design of Providence, recovered and mastered by man, he is at length permitted, also by design, to resuscitate the PAST itself from the sleep in which it has lain so long, and obtain by actual demonstration the last and completest corroboration of the sacred and profane history of his race. This is accomplished in two ways-first, by the opportunities and facilities for the first time afforded of exploration on_all sides and in every direction. The section made by a railway-cutting in an old country corresponds to the successive periods of its history

- as

you go down in the one, you go back in the other. But such sections were seldom or never to be had till now, when they open themselves almost everywhere. Secondly, it is arrived. at by the re-construction of the forgotten languages, presented to our view in ancient inscriptions. Philology can now do in literature what Cuvier taught us to do in geology-rear up, from a casual fragment, an alphabet and vocabulary, and make a revived tongue out of the most scanty materials it picks up. In these two ways the whole power of modern intellectual machinery is brought to bear upon antiquity; and, as might be expected, with results corresponding to that power, and worthy of the manifest hand of Providence displayed in the business.

Just at the period when these elements of power have been perfected, too, an unexampled opportunity of exercising them has been afforded by

a peace of extraordinary duration. Never has the world been so free to be walked over as it has been for the last forty years. Every gate has been on the latch for the traveller as he passes along. Every sea has been open; every port a friendly one. Is there nothing of design in this? But how long is such a state of things to last? At this moment the change has begun. By-andbye the great opportunity of the nineteenth century will be past by for ever. A movement, in the meantime, is going forward. What is the limit assignable to it? Can we discover any clue to what it is permitted to man to know, and what he must remain ignorant of? Arguing from analogy, we can see but one halting-place, namely, the point where the whole of the past shall have been thoroughly investigated and thoroughly understood. Such we conceive to be the design of Providence in what it permits and furthers. The annals of man from the outset (such is our creed) are intended to be fully opened up to the research of these latter days. There will not, we are persuaded, be one unchronicled nation, one missing tribe, one forgotten language on the face of the earth. Profane history will be confirmed or falsified, as it is authentic or the reverse. Sacred writ will be illustrated to its minutest details, by material and literary records, either of the people who penned it, or of the heathen nations who came in contact with them. Ethnology will be as completely understood as any other science. We shall be able, in individual instances, to trace back decay to refinement, refinement to prosperity, prosperity to heroism, heroism to simplicity, simplicity to barbarism, through the usual stages. And having thus familiarised ourselves with the past as a connected whole, we shall then see what we now only get a glimpse of now and then and here and there the plan upon which the whole machinery of history has worked, the centre of Truth round which it revolves.

We have, by this time, left the mass of the population, of whom we spoke so slightingly at the outset, far behind, we fear. They will not give a fig for our laws and our providential arrangements. They maintain as stoutly as ever, that the mine of his tory and antiquities is exhausted, and

that it is a useless expenditure of capital to work it further. Will all our readers rank themselves with these? If they do, we must e'en fall to proving, by undeniable facts, what we would much prefer their assenting to from our arguments. We must show, by sensible evidences, that so far is the vein of discovery from being exhausted, that the richest lodes, in all probability, lie as yet beneath the surface, and have never yet been hit upon.

In following out the inquiry,the starting point will be from this truth, which is not sufficiently considered in questions of the kind, that whatever impress man has at any period of his history made upon durable materials must, generally speaking, unless man have again interfered to deface the impression, exist somewhere or other to the present hour;-whether it be marble, or granite, or alabaster, or gold, or silver, or the gem, or brick that has received the form or imprint, there will it remain as long as these materials last, which will be, as we have said, generally speaking, to the end of historic time. Now, if we only realise this, and at the same time equally realise the truth of the histories which have recorded man's works, there must necessarily follow a confidence in prosecuting our search for these material objects, very likely to conduce to success; for we take it as a first principle that they must exist somewhere ; and as the only task which remains for us is to find them out, we are sure to set cheerfully to work. In this respect there is some analogy to natural and revealed truth, the study of both of which may be simultaneously carried on with equal vigour, it being certain that they must ultimately harmonise with, and illustrate each other.

The next thing we assume is, that all inscriptions have a meaning that is worth interpreting; and that they can be interpreted. As to the first, we have experience to go upon. What

ever has hitherto been found, has in some way conduced to man's knowledge of the history or the people it concerned; and, for the latter, there is the system-shall we call it science? -of reading by tabulation, which, if the slightest alphabetical foundation be once gained, enables us to raise the whole superstructure of a language.

Lastly, we take it for granted that every nation which has attained a cer