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Updated: June 24, 2025
A careful comparison of this kind, showing that in an entire month the average of the first week had been but one hundred and three drops, while the average of the last had been one hundred and thirty-eight drops, and that in the fifth week a frantic effort to abstain wholly for three days had obliged him to use on the fourth more than double the quantity to which of late he had been accustomed, would have prevented the incautious conclusion, suggested by his table, that De Quincey made use of laudanum but on two occasions after the expiration of the fourth week.
Nor is this one imperial column adorned by these alone: there are, besides, alas for Rousseau! two other spolia opima by which the French master is, in his own field, proved not the first, nor even the second, proximus, sed non secundus, so wide is the distance between De Quincey and any other antagonist. These two are the essays respectively entitled, "Joan of Arc," and "The English Mail-Coach."
"Oh, I know he will do it; he has done it to all his patients. He is so dreadfully absent-minded." If Miss Quincey had not been as guileless as the little old maid she was, she would have recognised these indications of intimacy; as it was, she said with superior conviction, "My dear, I know Dr. Cautley. He has never cut me before, and he would not do it now without a reason.
There was quite enough to satisfy the cravings even of his multiform spirit. He soon came to know, and to be on terms of greater or less intimacy with, Coleridge, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Southey, the celebrated Bishop Watson, of the See of Llandaff, Charles Lloyd, and others, then the genii loci.
But no such hapless lot was Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries Keats, half chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom they dully mumbled for the major portion of his life.
Having earned a respite from care by his marriage, Oscar did little for the next three years but talk. Critical observers began to make up their minds that he was a talker and not a writer. "He was a power in the art," as de Quincey said of Coleridge; "and he carried a new art into the power."
He also formed a warm friendship with Wordsworth, and, during his stay in Edinburgh, with Professor Wilson and De Quincey. The writings of the last-named author were published by Ticknor and Fields, in eighteen volumes, and were edited by Mr. Fields, at the author's own request. Mr. Fields is now in his fiftieth year, but shows no sign of age, save the whitening of his heavy, curling beard.
No temptation so strong could have been presented to Coleridge. De Quincey really craved the drug. His stomach was deranged, and was still suffering from the sad results of his youthful wanderings in London. It seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course into which he finally drifted.
And as all this was very confusing to the intellect Miss Quincey became crosser than ever. And while Miss Quincey quivered all over with irritability, the Mad Hatter paid no heed whatever to her instructions, but thrust forward a small yellow face that was all nose and eyes, and gazed at Miss Quincey like one possessed by a spirit of divination.
To be sure he brought a great many medicines that you cannot get made up at the chemist's, insight, understanding, sympathy, the tonic of his own virile youth; and Heaven only knows if these things were not the most expensive. All the time Miss Quincey was trying to keep up with the new standard imposed on the staff.
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