"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."

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

Dr. Chalmers and the other chiefs of the Free Church of Scotland, with the Rev. Dr. David Welsh for its first editor ; and, as it aimed at conjoining the utmost freedom and variety in the literary department with the advocacy of its special set of ecclesiastical principles, it was not likely to neglect the chance of securing an occasional contribution from an Edinburgh resident of such supreme literary distinction as De Quincey. Though I had heard it reported, however, that De Quincey had been a contributor to the North British Review, my inquiries on the subject some time ago had left me in doubt; and it has been only in the course of editing the present volume that I have ascertained the exact particulars. In the year 1848, when the Review was under the editorship of Dr. Chalmers's son-in-law, the late Rev. Dr. William Hanna, De Quincey, I find, did furnish it with three articles. The first of these, published in the number for May 1848, was that paper on Oliver Goldsmith which is the only paper in the present volume not already accounted for. It was with some natural interest that, on looking at an old copy of the number containing this first contribution of De Quincey to the North British Review, I found that the very next article to it in that number was my own first contribution to the same periodical. DAVID MASSON.

SHAKSPEARE 1

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE,2 the protagonist on the great arena of modern poetry, and the glory of the human intellect, was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, in the year 1564, and upon some day, not precisely ascertained, in the month of April. It is certain that he was baptized on the 25th; and from that fact, combined with some shadow of a tradition, Malone has inferred that he was born

1 Contributed in 1838 to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and republished in 1863 in Vol. XV of Messrs. A. & C. Black's Sixteen Volume Edition of De Quincey's Works, with a prefatory note containing this quotation from a letter of De Quincey's, of date July 16, 1838 :-"No paper ever cost me so much labour: parts "of it have been recomposed three times over. And thus far I anticipate your approval of this article, that no one question has been neglected which I ever heard of in connexion with Shakespeare's name; and I fear no rigour of examination, notwithstanding I have "had no books to assist me but the two volumes lent me by yourself (viz. 1st vol. of Alex. Chalmers's edit. 1826, and the late popular "edit. in one vol. by Mr. Campbell). The Sonnets I have been obliged to quote by memory, and for many of my dates or other "materials to depend solely on my memory." In a subsequent letter, the same prefatory note informs us, he repeated the statement thus :— "The Shakspeare article cost me more intense labour than any I ever "wrote in my life. The final part has cost me a vast deal of labour "in condensing; and I believe, if you examine it, you will not complain of want of novelty, which luckily was in this case quite "reconcilable with truth,-so deep is the mass of error which has gathered about Shakspeare."-M.

2 See, at the end of this paper, De Quincey's appended note on the spelling of the name.-M.

VOL. IV

on the 23d. There is doubtless, on the one hand, no absolute necessity deducible from law or custom, as either operated in those times, which obliges us to adopt such a conclusion; for children might be baptized, and were baptized, at various distances from their birth: yet, on the other hand, the 23d is as likely to have been the day as any other; and more likely than any earlier day, upon two arguments. First, because there was probably a tradition floating in the seventeenth century that Shakspeare died upon his birthday: now it is beyond a doubt that he died upon the 23d of April. Secondly, because it is a reasonable presumption that no parents, living in a simple community, tenderly alive to the pieties of household duty, and in an age still clinging reverentially to the ceremonial ordinances of religion, would much delay the adoption of their child into the great family of Christ. Considering the extreme frailty of an infant's life during its two earliest years, to delay would often be to disinherit the child of its Christian privileges: privileges not the less eloquent to the feelings from being profoundly mysterious, and, in the English Church, forced not only upon the attention, but even upon the eye, of the most thoughtless. According to the discipline of the English Church, the unbaptized are buried with "maimed rites,' shorn of their obsequies, and sternly denied that "sweet and solemn farewell" by which otherwise the Church expresses her final charity with all men; and not only so, but they are even locally separated and sequestrated. Ground the most hallowed, and populous with Christian burials of households

"That died in peace with one another,
Father, sister, son, and brother,"

opens to receive the vilest malefactor; by which the Church symbolically expresses her maternal willingness to gather back into her fold those even of her flock who have strayed from her by the most memorable aberrations; and yet, with all this indulgence, she banishes to unhallowed ground the innocent bodies of the unbaptized. To them and to suicides she turns a face of wrath. With this gloomy fact offered to the very external senses, it is difficult to suppose that any parents would risk their own reproaches by putting the