Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version.
When Gilfillan's Gallery first appeared, a copy of it was sent to an eminent lay-divine, the first sentence of whose reply was, You have sent me a list of shipwrecks . It was but too true, for that Gallery contains the name of a Godwin, shipwrecked on a false system, and a Shelley, shipwrecked on an extravagant version of that false system—and a Hazlitt, shipwrecked on no system at all—and a Hall, driven upon the rugged reef of madness—and a Foster, cast high and dry upon the dark shore of Misanthropy—and an Edward Irving, inflated into sublime idiocy by the breath of popular favor, and in the subsidence of that breath, left to roll at the mercy of the waves, a mere log—and lastly, a Coleridge and a De Quincy, stranded on the same poppy-covered coast, the land of the Lotos-eaters, where it is never morning, nor midnight, nor full day, but always afternoon.
Wrecks all these are, but all splendid and instructive withal. And we propose now—repairing to the shore, where the last great argosy, Thomas De Quincey, lies half bedded in mud—to pick up whatever of noble and rare, of pure and permanent, we can find floating around. We would speak of De Quincey's history, of his faults, of his genius, of his works, and of his future place in the history of literature. And when we reflect on what a mare magnum we are about to show to many of our readers, we feel for the moment as if it were new to us also, as if we stood—
Like stout Cortea, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, ——and all his men Gathered round him with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak of Darien.
We can not construct a regular biography of this remarkable man; neither the time for this has come, nor have the materials been, as yet, placed within reach of us, or of any one else. But we may sketch the outlines of what we know, which is indeed but little.