De Quincey has always impressed me as a fine example of the defects of
the English school and college training. Although he could write and
speak Greek fluently at thirteen, and although he had equally perfect
command of Latin and German, he was absolutely untrained in the use of
his knowledge and he knew no more about real life when he came out of
college than the average American boy of ten. With a splendid
scholarly equipment at seventeen, when thrown upon his own resources
in London, he came to the verge of starvation, and laid the seeds of
disease of the stomach, which afterward drove him to the use of opium.
All his training was purely theoretical; in the practical affairs of
life he remained to the day of his death a mere child. As he says in
his _Confessions_, he could have earned a good living as a corrector
of Greek proofs in any big London publishing house, but it never
occurred to his schoolboy mind that his mastery of this difficult
classical language was of any practical value. In our day De Quincey
would have been the greatest magazinist of the age, because his best
work was in the short essay; but it is to be feared that the
publishers of his time fattened on the good things which he produced
and gave small sums to the man who turned out these masterpieces with
so little effort.
De Quincey was born in 1785 and died in 1859. His life was peculiar
and its facts became very well known even in his own time because in
his _Autobiography_ and his _Confessions_ he disclosed its details
with the frankness of a child.
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