lodgings in No. 42 Lothian Street which he had tenanted for a while long before, but which, from the date of this re-entry into them, were to hold divided possession of him with the Lasswade country-home for the rest of his life. In the following year, 1855, matters were further complicated by the departure of his second daughter, Florence, for her marriage in India with Major Baird Smith, the already distinguished officer of the Bengal Engineers, afterwards known as Colonel Baird Smith, to whom she had been for some time engaged. As it was hardly possible then that the remaining and youngest daughter, Emily, should be left alone in the Lasswade cottage, and as De Quincey felt or fancied himself chained to his workshop in Lothian Street, the arrangements had to correspond. Accordingly, what we see for the next year or two is the dreamy old scholar buried in that workshop amid a litter of books, proofs, and manuscripts, and toiling at the production of volume after volume of his collective edition, but with his thoughts at every moment of leisure wandering with fatherly fondness towards his dispersed children. He kept up a loving correspondence with his daughter Mrs. Craig in her Irish home, and with his daughter Emily at such times as she chanced to be there with her sister; but his affections were turned also largely towards the son and daughter and son-in-law who were in India. Especially after the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny in January 1857 were his thoughts turned in their direction, his anxiety for news from them then rising to a high pitch of excitement. In the July of that year he had the satisfaction of again setting his eyes on one of them,-his son, Paul Frederick, having then come home on leave, after having served through the first actions against the Mutiny, and been promoted to captain's rank; and it was during this visit that there occurred that journey of De Quincey to Ireland, in the convoy of the captain and of Miss De Quincey, to see his eldest daughter and her children in their Irish abode, which was so unusual a feat of locomotion for him in his old age. Not till December 1858, however, when De Quincey had but one year more to live, was the Indian Mutiny totally suppressed; and in the last year of his life what was freshest in his mind was the recollection of the horrors of

this dreadful business, mingled with pride in the nobly conspicuous part that had been performed by his son-in-law, Colonel Baird Smith, both in the military and in the civil exertions required for the great re-conquest. When De Quincey died, in Lothian Street, Edinburgh, on the 8th of December 1859, it was in the presence of Mrs. Craig, who had come over from Ireland on summons, and of Miss De Quincey, who had for some time been in close attendance upon him. Captain De Quincey was then back in India; and Mrs. Baird Smith, after four years of life in India, was on her way home.

Not long after the death of De Quincey himself, there was a further thinning of the family by the death in Brazil of the medical son, Francis (the third of the sons originally), and the death in India of the greatly regretted Colonel Baird Smith. Both deaths occurred in 1861. Ten years later, in 1871, Mrs. Craig, the eldest of De Quincey's daughters, died in Ireland. Since then the only surviving children of De Quincey have been the above-mentioned Indian soldier, Paul Frederick (the fifth of the family originally), and his two remaining and younger sisters, Mrs. Baird Smith and Miss De Quincey. The first of these, having ceased his Indian soldiering a good many years ago, when he had attained the rank of brigade-major, became a settler in New Zealand by purchasing lands there; and he has remained there ever since, married but with no family, engaged chiefly in farming occupations, though now and then rendering services to the colony on occasions calling his military experience into requisition,— e.g. in the organisation of the New Zealand Militia about the time of the last Maori war. His present post is that of Sergeant-at-Arms to the New Zealand Parliament. Mrs. Baird Smith and her children reside in London, and Miss De Quincey with them.

The sole remaining son being at such a distance, it is on Mrs. Baird Smith and Miss De Quincey that the guardianship of their father's memory in this country, in literary respects as well as in others, has mainly devolved. They have been true to the duty. It was they that furnished much of the material, in the shape of preserved family letters and other documents, that enriched Mr. Page's full and excel

lent Biography of De Quincey, in two volumes, published in 1877; and their own contributions to those volumes are among the most interesting portions of their contents. No reader of the volumes can forget the tender pages in them which contain Mrs. Baird Smith's recollections of her father in the early days of her own childhood, when she and his other children were left orphans with him in Edinburgh after their mother's death, or the charming picture she gives of him and his domestic ways in the later and happier days of his established residence at Lasswade; and Miss De Quincey's account of her father's last illness and death has all the fidelity and exactness of a record of daughterly affection from the closing scene itself. Both Mrs. Baird Smith and Miss De Quincey, we may now add, have extended their interest in their father's memory to the present collective edition of his writings. It is by their kind help that some facts and dates that would not otherwise have been ascertainable have been recovered for this biographic summary; and it is to Mrs. Baird Smith in particular that we are indebted for the use in these volumes of some of the valuable family portraits in her possession. Already, by her leave, we have been able to present the reader with reproductions of several of these, viz. the chalk-drawing group of De Quincey, retat. 70, with two of his daughters (Mrs. Craig and Miss De Quincey), which forms the frontispiece to Vol. I., and the miniatures of De Quincey's father, mother, and uncle, which form the frontispiece to Vol. III., with the striking head of De Quincey himself, ætat. 17, which appears as a vignette in that volume. To these we have the pleasure of adding in the present volume two more illustrations from the same collection. The vignette miniature of De Quincey's brother Richard, the famous "Brother Pink" of the Autobiography, is published by Mrs. Baird Smith's leave; the portrait of Mrs. Baird Smith herself appears by the express permission of her daughters, the Misses Baird Smith, who are the possessors of the original picture.

All the more because of these various favours are we bound to insert here, at the request of Mrs. Baird Smith and Miss De Quincey, a communication intended to obviate what they think might be a possible misconstruction of

certain sentences in the account given in Vol. I. (pp. xví-xix) of De Quincey's domestic circumstances in the last years of his life. -The communication is as follows:"Mr. "de Quincey's daughters would desire to state that the "home at Lasswade was never either partially or wholly "broken up till after their father's death; that it was not "till long after Mrs. Baird Smith left for India that he was forced, by pressure of work for his collected edition, to be more in Edinburgh than at home; that he was never "without a daughter, or daughters, at home, or ready to "return home at a moment's notice had they by chance "taken the opportunity of his necessary absence for visits to "friends or relatives; and that the home was always left in "charge of a trusted old servant, living close at hand, to 66 prepare for an immediate return in the event of a sudden summons by Mr. de Q. In proof of this statement that "the home was not broken up till after Mr. de Quincey's 68 death, it may be mentioned that it was arranged that Mrs. "Baird Smith, on her return from India with her children "in the winter of 1859-60, should join her father and sister "in the home at Lasswade,—an arrangement which only his "death before her return put a stop to. Finally, it must be "noted that, at the first friendly hint from Mr. Findlay that "Mr. de Q. was not seemingly in his usual health, Miss de Quincey hastened to him and was his companion and 66 nurse during his last long illness, her absence at that time "being the result of constraining family opinion, shared in "by Mr. de Quincey himself (but wholly repugnant to his "daughter's feeling), that she ought not to be left alone in a solitary house during the long dark winter nights. It may "naturally be asked why she could not join her father in 66. Edinburgh. It is sufficient to say that, when Mr. de "Quincey found it necessary to separate himself from his "family, it was for the sake of his work, for the successful "prosecution of which he had to secure himself from social "" interruptions; and, as his daughters had many and most "kind friends in Edinburgh, his plight in respect to social "demands would have been worse than at home had she

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"joined him. Besides, Mrs. Wilson's accommodation for "another member of the family was so insufficient that it

"would have been a serious inconvenience, even at the "time of his last illness, had Miss de Q.'s thoughts "not been too deeply occupied in her sad and anxious "work to give any attention to it. Mr. de Quincey's "daughters, all together, and each in turn, claim to have "fulfilled their duty to their father with that devotion "which his eminently lovable character inspired, a duty "which became more and more easy and delightful to fulfil as more and more during his latter years he escaped from "the disorganising bondage of opium."

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Of the nine papers of De Quincey included in the present volume, four,-viz. those on Shakespeare, Pope, Goethe, and Schiller, were contributions to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, begun in 1827 under the editorship of Mr. Macvey Napier, and completed in 1842. These were reprinted in 1863 by the present proprietors of De Quincey's Works (who are also the owners of the Encyclopædia) in one of their two supplementary volumes to De Quincey's own fourteen-volume edition of his collected writings. Reprinted thus posthumously, they appeared there, and are now reproduced, without any revision by the author. The other five papers of the volume did have this benefit, having been reprinted by De Quincey himself in his Collective Edition. Two of these,-viz. the elaborate and extremely important biography of Richard Bentley, and the highly interesting and amusing compilation of anecdotes respecting Kant in his last days,—are of the dates 1830 and 1827 respectively, and were among De Quincey's earliest contributions to Blackwood's Magazine. Of the remaining three papers, one,—that on Herder, -is a reprint of an article of 1823 in one of the numbers of De Quincey's first fathering periodical, the London Magazine; another, the biographic sketch of Milton,—was recovered by De Quincey from the pages of a forgotten London miscellany of 1838, and was adapted for republication by some footnotes and by the addition of a long and characteristic Postscript; and the third,—the biographic sketch of Goldsmith, —had appeared originally in the North British Review. This last-named periodical, an Edinburgh quarterly of high character, had been established in 1844, under the auspices of