326 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



charitableness. I am not so passionate in temper as you think. In 

 comparison with yourself, I am the Prince of Peacefhlness, for you 

 are a nature of dreadful passions subdued by reason. I wish you 

 would praise me as a lecturer on Moral Philosophy. That would 

 do me good ; and say that I am thoroughly logical and argumenta- 

 tive — for it is true ; not a rhetorician, as fools aver. I think, with 

 practice and opportunities, I would have been an orator. Am I a 

 good critic ? We are all well. I have been very ill with rheuma- 

 tism. God bless you, my dear friend, and believe me ever yours 

 affectionately, J- W." 



The friendship subsisting between Mr. De Quincey and my father 

 has already been mentioned. From 1809, when he was his com- 

 panion in pedestrian rambles and the sharer of his purse, till the 

 hour of his death, that friendship remained unbroken, though some- 

 times, in his strange career, months or years would elapse without 

 my father either seeing or hearing of him. If this singular man's 

 life were written truthfully, no one would believe it, so strange 

 the tale would seem. It may well be cause of regret that, by his 

 own fatal indulgence, he had warped the original beauty of his na- 

 ture. For fine sentiment and much tender kindliness of disposition 

 gleamed through the dark mists which had gathered around him, 

 and imperfectly permitted him to feel the virtue he so eloquently 

 described. For the most part his habit of sympathy was such that 

 it elevated the dark passions of life, investing them with an awful 

 grandeur, destructive to the moral sense. Those beautiful writings 

 of his captivate the mind, and would fain invite the reader to be- 

 lieve that the man they represent is De Quincey himself. But not 

 even in the " Autobiography" is his personnel to be found. He in- 

 deed knew how to analyze the human heart, through all its deep 

 windings, but in return he offered no key of access to his own. In 

 manner no man was more courteous and naturally dignified ; the 

 strange vicissitudes of his life had given him a presence of mind 

 which never deserted him, even in positions the most trying. It 

 was this quality that gave him, in combination with his remarkable 

 powers of persuasion, command over all minds; the ignorant were 

 silenced by awe, and the refined fascinated as by the spell of a ser- 

 pent. The same faults in common men would have excited con- 

 tempt; the same irregularities of life in ordinary mortals would 



