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mire; not even the "Songs without Words" seemed to speak home to his heart of hearts; and alike to "May-bells" and "Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast," warbled by sweet sistervoices, he could listen without a thrill. Bellini was so far a favourite with him, that he often asked his daughters Florence and Emily to give him the well-worn "Deh Conte;" nor would he tire of gems from the "Don Giovanni," or of "Questo Semplice," or of such time-tried strains as "Time hath not thinned," "O lovely Peace," "In chaste Susanna's praise," "Down the dark waters," "By limpid streams," "And will he not come again," "Birds blithely sing ing," etc. He exulted in the fervour of expression and the musician-like touch and facility of execution with which his youngest daughter, still under professional instruction, rendered Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetica," Weber's "Invitation," and Pergolesi's "Gloria in Excelsis." When he had written to invite me to visit him, he had promised me, if I liked such things, music and laughter in abundance, on the part of his three days. And well was the promise kept. Yet did he not promise me two things-music and laughter? In effect I found it to be all one, for the laughter itself was music.

His eldest daughter's delicate health was at this period a matter of grave anxiety to him, and the doctor's report of organic mischief in progress at the lungs overwhelmed him with solicitude and misgivings. She kept house for him, and he expressed to me, with the most charming naïveté and innocent candour, his supreme amazement at the economical tact with which, while exercising all the year round a quiet system of modest hospitality, she contrived to make both ends meet. Comfortable as she made his home, and happy as she and her two sisters made himself, he yet lamented piteously the inroads on his time caused by visitors. His only salvation, he said, for this chronic curse of distracting interruptions would entail the loss to his daughters of their only relaxation. He lamented, too, the smallness of his "den," overcrowded with books and papers. In this room he had left himself space only to slide along to his table through piles of volumes. His daughters told me this was the first house he had not built them out of with these everaccumulating books. Thrice in Westmoreland had such been their fate, and they laughed at their own imprudence in leaving a bath in this room of his, which he instantly utilised past recovery as a receptacle for literary matter, heaped up, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. They laughed, too, over his quaint trick of carrying off every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on any old envelope or newspaper, not unfrequently on the bland pretext of "burning it for you" in that fire of his which was never allowed to go out the whole year round, and which, in a little room so

densely charged with combustible matter, was to them a source of some natural anxiety.

It was on 22d July that I repeated my visit, remaining with him at Mavis Bush until the 27th. Meanwhile, he had been gratified by a visit from Mr Fields, of Boston, U.S.A., who, on leaving, had put into Miss De Quincey's hands a cheque for a part of the profits accruing from the sale of the American edition of his works, to be kept from her father's knowledge till he should have returned home from seeing his American guest to the coach. Miss Martineau had spent the afternoon with him the day before, and he spoke of her with real liking in his words and manner. If her size had impressed him, so had her quietness of demeanour; and adopting Elia's phrase, he designated her the gentle giantess. She, on her part, had been pleasantly impressed by his voice, and had exclaimed to his eldest daughter apart, alluding to her own deafness, "Oh, what a voice! so clear, so soft, so sweet! so delightful a contrast to the way people have of bawling to me."

On the 25th, he hoped to have taken me to morning service at the Episcopal chapel on the Duke of Buccleuch's grounds, Dalkeith, but was not well enough at the appointed hour; and I accompanied his three daughters to the chapel, driving through Bonnyrigg and Lowton, and coming within view of Cock pen Tower and of the Lammermoor Hills by the way. He talked of the service on our return, and showed how far his sympathies went with a moderately-ornate ritual. Sound Church of England man, as it was his great right and his pride to call himself, he avowed that his antagonism to Rome was mainly as a political system. On this Sunday afternoon he avowed the vehement hatred he had always cherished for the Judaic continuance of a Sabbath in the Judaic sense. Sabbath he hailed as a sublime word, but its exclusive beauty and significance were ruined, to his sense, by the "base universal usage of it on the most trivial occasions." For some Presbyterian ministers, notably Dr Hanna, with whom he had agreeable relations in contributing to the North British Review, his regard was unaffectedly cordial. It must be remembered that a Scottish Broad Church party, such as could have better claimed his sympathies, as a party was hardly then in existence. The Norman Macleods and the Tullochs, as a power in the Kirk, were yet to come. He was curious to know more about Professor Maurice, who "has been talked of to me as the greatest man in the Church of England," but who thus far had failed to impress him with a sense of real or definite power. All seemed so indefinite when looked closely into. What seemed firm ground gave way beneath your tread. As to Charles Kingsley and the Christian Socialist, "I am puzzled to know what in the world they would be at." Mr Gladstone's

splendid powers had a charm for him: "But what am I to think [1852] of his sympathies with a party abroad which at home would be identified with extreme democracy?" Not that extreme democracy in politics, any more than abstract atheism as such, was to Mr De Quincey otherwise than philosophically interesting. One of the periodicals of the day which he seemed to read with great zest was the Leader, of the editor of which, Mr G. H. Lewes, he spoke with inquiring eagerness. During our walk together into Edinburgh on the day of my finally quitting Mavis Bush, he expatiated with unprecedented animation on German theology of the advanced school, and freely recognised the "enormity" of the difficulties which rigid orthodoxy had to confront. Passing on to speak of practical difficulties, he said: "Frightfully perplexed I am to this hour as to what constitutes the so-called appropriation of the benefits of Christ's death. Never could I get any one to clear it up to me. Coleridge was utterly vague on the subject. He talked all about it and about it, but never talked it out, that I could discover. Often have I discussed the question with my mother, a clear-headed and thoughtful woman, devoted to the evangelical system, and a devout supporter of the Record-which paper I honour, as, in the other extreme, but for the same reason, I do the Leader, for its candid and obvious earnestness in enforcing the views it has so sincerely at heart-but she would utterly fail to comprehend my difficulties. 'My dear child,' she would repeat, you have simply to trust in the blood of Christ.' 'Very well,' I would reply, 'and I am quite willing; I reverence Christ; but what does this trusting mean? How am I to know exactly what to do? Upon what specifically am I to take hold to support me when flesh and heart faileth, in the hour of death, and at the day of judgment?' Countless different schemes there are to expound this doctrine of trust and of appropriation, but they remind me of the ancilia at Rome, the eleven copies of the sacred shield or palladium-to prevent the true one being stolen, the eleven were made exactly like it. So with the true doctrine of the atonement-it is lurking among the others that look like it, but who is to say which of them all it is?"

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After taking coffee with me that evening, Mr De Quincey surpassed himself in copious eloquence and vivid variety of discourse, from grave to gay, from lively to severe. He talked of the history he proposed to write-a "philosophical history of England, perhaps up to the period when Macaulay begins." The novel he had in contemplation was to be about two prisoners in Austria, in the time of Maria Theresa. He said of his translated novel, "Walladmor," that it arose out of a hasty review of the German

original inserted in the London Magazine. Taylor & Hessey being struck with the extracts as he had Englished them, commissioned him to translate the complete work. The complete work, he said, turned out to be complete trash; but he did his best, partly recast the story, and gave more point to the conversations. It found a few admirers, among whom it was gratifying to him to reckon Dora Wordsworth (Mrs Quillinan).

As I walked with him along Princes Street to the Mound on his way home, I noticed the nervous solicitude with which he refrained from any gesture, while passing a cabstand, that might seem to warrant any driver in concluding himself summoned and engaged. Some unhappy experience of a mistake of this kind may have been the secret of his disquiet, for evidently he entertained a dread of the "overbearing brutality of these men." He spoke of his short-sightedness, which at Oxford had been so marked, that' he was rumoured to be a bit of a Jacobin because he failed to "cap" the master of his college (Worcester) when he met him, only from sheer inability to recognise him by sight. We paused to look at the display of French and German books in Seton's window, and he would willingly have lingered there till sunset, glancing from author to author, with a word for (or against) each. Seeing in Bell & Bradfute's window a copy of Hawthorne's "Mosses," about which I had been talking to his daughters, I went in to buy it, he readily undertaking the light porterage; and it led him to talk of Hawthorne's genius, and to mention a recent visit of Emerson's-to neither of whom could he accord quite the degree of admiration claimed for them by the more thoroughgoing of their respective admirers. Our way lay through George Square to the Meadows, and at the end of "Lovers' Walk" he insisted on my not incurring the fatigue of accompanying him further. It was between eight and nine on that lovely July evening that I took leave-my last leave-of the man to whom I owed so much. At the very moment of parting, all seemed to me like a dream: that we had ever met, that we were now parting. Could it all be but the baseless fabric of a vision, and was this the break-up, to leave not a rack behind?

"The old man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream."

The parting was over, and he went on his way. Lingering, I watched that receding figure, as it diminished in the distance. The last I saw of him, he had opened Hawthorne's book, and went along reading as he walked. In that attitude I lost sight of him. He went on his way, and I saw him no more.

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taken from school and apprenticed to his father's business at Windsor, his father saying that he had acquired knowledge enough to fit him for his station in life.

The change in his life was not without its attendant dangers, as it gave the "opportunity for desultory reading to the neglect of all systematic acquirement; the tendency to day-dreams and morbid fancies, in the utter want of improving companionship." From the age of fourteen to seventeen he worked irregularly at learning the printer's trade. It was a time of great political excitement, and besides the reading of many classic English authors he carefully scanned the daily newspapers. He became impressed with the injustice of the many injudicious taxes then levied, and the miserable condition of the lower classes. An old folio edition of Shakespeare which had come into his possession, though sadly mutilated, gave him an opportunity of showing his skill and taste in restoring the portions of the text which had been destroyed.

CHARLES KNIGHT, the eminent publisher and | spent happily enough; when in 1805 he was author, was born at Windsor in 1791. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy yeoman from Buckinghamshire, died shortly after his birth, when he was left to the care of his father, who was a bookseller possessing literary tastes, and who to his bookselling business had added that of printing. He published a "Windsor Guide," and a magazine called the Microcosm, which was conducted by Etonians. This brought Mr Knight the elder into contact with some youths of talent, amongst them George Canning. Charles early formed a taste for reading, which was abundantly nourished with the literature found in his father's shop. He was left a good deal to himself, and when sent to school he complained that it was rather dreary, and did not take kindly to his lessons. Returning home from school one day he was a witness of the bread riots, in which the poor people of the town, believing that the high price of corn was due to combination on the part of corn-factors, millers, and bakers, smashed the windows of several bakers' shops in the town. The price of the quartern loaf at that time was 1s. 9d. In his boyish days he was familiar with the face and form of George III., who seemed to know and remember everybody. He caught a glimpse of Pitt waiting outside Windsor Palace until the king and queen should descend the Eastern Terrace. "The immobility of those features, the erectness of that form, told of one born to command. The loftiness and breadth of the forehead spoke of sagacity and firmness-the quick eye, of eloquent promptitude-the nose, somewhat twisted out of the perpendicular, made his enemies say his face was as crooked as his policy." He had glimpses of other notables, such as Dr and Fanny Burney. The people of Windsor, as he remarks, "vegetated, although living amidst a continual din of royalty going to and fro-of bell-ringing for birthdays-of gun-firing for victories of reviews in the park-of the relief of the guard, with all pomp of military music-of the chapel bell tolling twice a day, unheeded by few besides official worshippers-of crowding to the Terrace on Sunday evenings-of periodical holidays, such as Ascot races and Egham races -of rare festivities, such as a fête at Frogmore." The business people of Windsor conducted their callings on the most easy-going principles, and did not dream of the exacting competition of a later time.

When twelve years of age Charles Knight was sent to a classical school at Ealing, kept by the Rev. Dr Nicholas. The time at Ealing was

At one time he entertained an idea of studying for the bar, but this notion being relinquished he began to think that literature in some fɔrm or another must be his vocation. He would be a journalist, and he began to prepare himself for his future vocation by the study of De Lolme, Blackstone, and Burke. In 1810 he thought he might do something to dissipate the proud ignorance which hung over Windsor, by starting a reading society, the influence of which proved so far beneficial for the short time it lasted. Tired of Windsor life he came to London, and commenced his apprenticeship to literature by becoming a reporter on the Globe newspaper. The experience he thus gained in the House of Commons, and of London life generally, was of immense importance to him, and he went back to Windsor in 1812, with what he terms "some enlargement of my intellectual vision."

He had for some time cherished the project of a newspaper which might help to "reform many things" in the neighbourhood of his native Windsor, advocate everything that thinking men will support-toleration, education of the poor, diffusion of religious knowledge, public economy. In his twenty-first year he became editor and proprietor along with his father of the Windsor and Eton Express. The work of periodical writing begun with the issue of this newspaper was continued for fifty years. The publication of a newspaper at that time was heavily burdened with taxation. The news

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Knight made his first distinct venture into the region of popular literature, with an article in the Windsor Express, on 11th December 1819, under the heading of "Cheap Publications." "There is a new power," he wrote, "entrusted to the great mass of the working people, and it is daily becoming of wider extent and wider importance. Knowledge must have its worldly as well as its spiritual range; it looks towards heaven, but it treads upon the earth. The mass of useful books are not accessible to the poor; newspapers, with their admix. ture of good and evil, seldom find their way into the domestic circle of the labourer or artisan; the tracts which pious persons distribute are exclusively religious, and the tone of these is often either fanatical or puerile. The twopenny trash,' as it is called, has seen further, with the quick perception of avarice or ambition, into the intellectual wants of the

paper stamp was then fourpence, the advertisement duty was three shillings. The censorship of the press was also extremely rigid. In 1810 William Cobbett had been sentenced to two years' imprisonment and to a fine of a thousand pounds for his plain speaking regarding flogging in the local militia of Ely. "Moore's Almanac" had a great circulation, and was implicitly believed in by the illiterate. "If," says Charles Knight, "the great astrologer prophesied disaster, few would be the believers in success. There was scarcely a home in Southern England in which this two shillings' worth of imposture was not to be found. There was scarcely a farmer who would cut his grass if the almanac predicted rain. No cattle-doctor would give a drench to a cow unless he consulted the table in the almanac showing what sign the moon is in, and what part of the body it governs." In 1813 he wrote a play, which he called "Arminius," which was afterwards pub-working classes. It was just because there was lished.

Meanwhile, as editor and reporter, his education was going on, and one means of bettering the condition of the poor, about which he never had any doubt, was that they should be thoroughly educated. His nomination in 1818 to the post of one of the overseers of the parish of Windsor was a valuable initiation into public business. After some months' experience of paupers and pauperism, he ventured to propose to his brother officers that they should visit the out-door poor in their own homes. This startling proposal was carried out, when they saw many things with their own eyes calculated to lessen theorising. In addition to parish affairs his mind was continually busied with literary schemes. "I may truly say," he remarks, "and I say it for the encouragement of any young man who is sighing over the fetters of his daily labour, and pining for weeks and months of uninterrupted study-that I have found through life that the acquisition of knowledge, and a regular course of literary employment, are far from being incompatible with commercial pursuits. I doubt whether, if I had been all author or all publisher, I should have succeeded better in either capacity." His first venture as publisher and editor was a reprint of Fairfax's "Tasso," to which he prefixed a life of Tasso and a life of Fairfax.

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no healthful food for their newly-created appetite, that sedition and infidelity have been so widely disseminated." The publication of this article led to Mr Knight's introduction to Mr Locker, and one of the results was the publication of the Plain Englishman on 1st February 1820. This was continued for three years. On the title-page of this work it was described as "comprehending original compositions, and selections from the best writers, under the heads of "The Christian Monitor,' 'The British Patriot,' 'The Fireside Companion.' This division he afterwards looked upon as a mistake, and mentions the fact that Dr Arnold spoke in terms of high commendation of a short article on Mirabeau which he had written, in which the religious feeling was infused as part of the whole. Illustrations in the then state of wood-engraving would have been too poor and too expensive for the Plain Englishman; and as the exciting events of the day lent a supreme interest to the newspaper, this publication was abandoned in 1822. One of the papers in the last volume bore the title of "Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," and seemed a forecast of the honourable work in which Charles Knight as author and editor was so shortly afterwards to be engaged.

The late connection with Mr Locker led Mr Knight to become editor of the Guardian, a The literature of the period was of a very low London weekly, which he speedily improved. cast, and as early as 1814 he had entertained One of his articles, entitled "Magazine Day," the notion of supplanting, by something purer excited not a little interest in Paternoster Row, and better, the literature embraced in "Lives as it afforded a glimpse of magazine publishing of Highwaymen," or the "History of Witch-half a century ago. Blackwood's Magazine had craft," and the cheap novels which revelled in just started on its brilliant and prosperous murders, adulteries, and familiarity with the de- career. The London was the only English tails of crime. These, with the "Newgate Calen- monthly which could be compared to it, dar," and the "Book of Dreams," were almost although the points of difference were many. the only variety to be found in the hawker's There was a Monthly, a Ladies', a New Monthly pack. There was little good and useful reading and the sober brown-coated Gentleman's Mawithin the reach of the multitude when Charlesgazine. The best of all forms of literary go

vernment in magazine editing Knight describes as "a secret despotism." With growing experience, and with schemes of new magazines in his head, it was not to be supposed that he would remain editor of the Guardian, and so we find, in the season of 1823, that he had taken up his position as a publisher in Pall Mall, East. His previous connection with, and the fact of the publication of the Etonian, along with his father, was now of service to him. This little magazine had become a nucleus around which many talented young writers had gathered themselves, notably, Walter Blunt, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, T. B. Macaulay, Henry Nelson Coleridge, Moultrie, and others. As soon as the plan of Knight's Quarterly Magazine was settled, he found himself in possession of contributions sufficient in number and quality to guarantee immediate publication. "There is," says Mr Knight, "no happiness of the editorial life equal to that of first reading the manuscript of a contributor in which original genius is so manifest that none but a blockhead would venture upon an alteration." This happiness he experienced thus early in his editorial career. Some of the most spirited of Macaulay's ballads appeared in its pages, and some of the best of Moultrie's poems. Though full of wit, humour, and earnest thinking, it was not pecuniarily successful, and so was discontinued after the sixth number. He was fairly settled as a publisher in 1824. One of the birds of passage who came to him with many brilliant literary schemes was Robert Mudie. Literary adventurers, neglected authors, would waste much precious time for him in retailing their woes to the young publisher. For a short time he was personally occupied in editing and publishing versions of French memoirs. He published the "Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary," by Captain John Dundas Cochrane, with great success. In this connection he remarks: "In a varied intercourse, such as that of an aspiring publisher, he must have very dull faculties to allow them to stagnate. Give him a prosperous career, and few occupations can be happier, great as may be his risks and responsibilities." In July 1825 a work of unusual importance was issued by him, "Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine," which had been discovered in the State Paper Office. The large and comprehensive scheme of a "National Library," a cheap series of works which should condense the information contained in voluminous and expensive works, was launched at this period. The subjects of about a hundred volumes were settled. In conjunction with Colburn and Whittaker the scheme was arranged to be taken up at once. But the general commercial distress prevalent at the time, when the firm of Hurst & Robinson fell, dragging down Constable, Ballantyne, and Sir Walter Scott, pre

vented this arrangement being carried out. After rearranging his scheme, it so happened that Lord Brougham was engaged in establishing the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Brougham sent for Mr Knight, the matter was quickly arranged, and heartily entered into, and Knight's business was merged into that of Mr Murray. But differences of opinion about the editorial responsibility arose, the arrangement as to the purchase of stock and copyrights presented new obstacles, and so in 1827, "I was heartsick at last, and abandoning the whole scheme, left it for the imitation of others of more independent means."

These troubles in his outward life did not entirely destroy his peace of mind, his domestic life with his wife and four little girls was happy, and with ready power of adapting himself to new circumstances, we find him next engaged as a writer in the Sphinx, a paper edited by Mr Silk Buckingham. This course of journalism was not, however, agreeable to him. He left the office, and for a short time superintended the publication of an annual called Friendship's Offering. This employment was made all the more agreeable to him, in that several of his old friends, contributors to the Quarterly Magazine, also wrote for this venture. In July 1827 he took a very important step in life in assuming the superintendence of the works issued by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Lord Brougham's introductory manual in the "Library of Useful Knowledge" had been very successful, and emboldened the society and its new editor in the issue of another series, to be called the "Library of Entertaining Knowledge." A perusal of the existing almanacs, which were superstitious, incorrect, and crowded with senseless absurdities, led him in 1827 to elaborate the scheme of a more rational and useful almanac. Although the sanction of the society was only gained for this scheme in the middle of November, "The British Almanac" made its appearance before the 1st of January, price half-a-crown. Ten thousand copies of it were sold within a week. This led to the issue of “A Companion to the Almanac," and he afterwards remarked with satisfaction regarding both, that "the pair have travelled on together for thirtyseven years under my direction, through many changes of times and men," while "the general features of these publications have undergone very little change during this long period." He superintended their publication up till 1868, when the work was handed on to another, with its high character unimpaired. In the interest of the society and its publications, he made an enjoyable and instructive tour through the busiest industrial parts of England.

The schemes of the society were growing in extent, so much so that Mr Murray, the pub lisher, parted from the concern. Making terms with the society for the sale of their publications,

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