There is a great deal more to be said about this Volume V, but we must skip along. (There is no reason, you know, why you shouldn’t look up the book for yourself.) We will just be generous enough to pass on De Quincey’s anecdote about how Coleridge first became a great reader. Coleridge, as a child, was going down the Strand in a day dream, imagining himself swimming the Hellespont. Moving his hands as though swimming, he happened to touch a gentleman’s pocket. The latter thought him a young pickpocket. “What! so young and yet so wicked?” The boy, terrified, sobbed a denial, and explained that he had been imagining himself as Leander. The gentleman was so pleased that he gave him a subscription to a circulating library.
The next volume of De Quincey that we intend to study is X, in which we find Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected. We are rather stricken to note that these were addressed to a young man who was exactly the same age as ourself.
The first of these letters was evidently in the nature of a Christmas present to the young gentleman, known to us only as Mr. M. It is dated December 24, 1824. Whether Mr. M. was an actual person and drew this letter from his stocking on Christmas morning we are not informed. Our own conjecture is that he was as mythical as his sister-in-lore Miss M., of Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget. Somehow there is a humorous lack of reality in the way De Quincey introduces him. Mr. M. is in possession of “great opulence, unclouded reputation, and freedom from unhappy connexions.” Also he had “the priceless blessing of unfluctuating health.” And yet he exhibited “a general dejection.” This, a young lady of seventeen told De Quincey, “was well known to arise from an unfortunate attachment in early life.” But finally De Quincey exhumed the truth. Mr. M. had been defrauded of education. And Mr. M.’s first inquiry is whether at his present age of 32 it would be worth his while to go to college.
No, indeed, is De Quincey’s unhesitant reply. Mr. M. would be 12 or 14 years older than his fellow-students, which would make their association “mutually burthensome.” And as for the value of college lectures—
These whether public or private, are surely the very worst modes of acquiring any sort of accurate knowledge, and are just as much inferior to a good book on the same subject as that book hastily read aloud, and then immediately withdrawn, would be inferior to the same book left in your possession, and open at any hour to be consulted, retraced, collated, and in the fullest sense studied.
It appears that the dejected young man, despite—or perhaps on account of—his lack of education, nourished a secret desire to be a writer. He had been reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, particularly the chapter called An Affectionate Exhortation to Those Who in Early Life Feel Themselves Disposed to Become Authors. According to De Quincey, Mr. M. asks his opinion on Coleridge’s views of this topic. Alas! now we are more convinced than ever that Mr. M. is only a phantom: unquestionably De Quincey, the canny super-journalist, wafted him from the opium flagon as an ingenious target for some anti-Coleridge banter. His chaff directed at Coleridge is gorgeous enough. It is double-decked chaff, too; for he not only affectionately twits his fellow opium-eater in propria persona, but introduces for discussion an anonymous “eminent living Englishman,” who is plainly also Coleridge. He compares C. with Leibnitz for his combination of fine mind with a physique of equine robustness. This passage somehow causes us to chuckle aloud—
They were centaurs—heroic intellects with brutal capacities of body. What partiality in nature! In general, a man has reason to think himself well off in the great lottery of this life if he draws the prize of a healthy stomach without a mind; or the prize of a fine intellect with a crazy stomach; but that any man should draw both is truly astonishing.
The first letter concludes with a charmingly humorous discussion of the problem (valid now as then) how a man of letters may get any creative work done and at the same time keep his wife and children happy.
II
Old Bill Barron, up in the composing room, asks us when we are going to take our Vacation. We are taking it now, we reply, reading De Quincey. Certainly we can’t imagine why any one with as pleasing a job as ours should have any right to go off on holiday. There are so many people in this town who have to spend their time reading the new books: we are going to enjoy ourself by dipping into the old ones. With one exception. We have found, in the office of the Literary Review, and immediately made off with, L’Extravagante Personnalité de Jacques Casanova, by Joseph Le Gras (Paris: Bernard Grasset). We read the first sentence—