of that figure was a "thing to dream of, not to see." I felt sure I should lose my reason if the cloak opened and discovered the loathsome body. I had no idea what I should see, but I knew I should go mad.

In my dock by the window, and with the light behind my eyes I felt secure. But at that moment no earthly consideration, no consideration whatever, would have induced me to face that ghostly form in the flicker of expiring light. I was not under any delusion. I knew then as well as I know now that there was no object on which the normal human eye could exercise itself between me and the bed. I deliberately willed the figure to appear, and although once I had summoned it I could not dismiss it, I had complete and self-possessed knowledge that I saw nothing with my physical eye. Moreover, full of potentiality for terror as that figure was in its present shape and attitude, it had no dread for me. I was fascinated by considering possibilities which I knew could not arise so long as the present circumstances remained unchanged. In

other words, I knew I could trust my reason to keep my imagination in subjection, so long as my senses were not confused or my attention scared. If I attempted to extinguish the candles that figure might waver! if I moved across the floor it might get behind my back, and as I caught sight of it over my shoulder, the cloak might fall aside! Then I should go mad. Thus I sat and waited until daylight came. Then I fell asleep in my chair.

As I have said, the copy of the Opiumeater I then had was bound in red cloth. It was a much handsomer book than the humble one published by Routledge. Since that memorable night many years ago in my high, dreary, lonely bedroom, I cannot tell you all the copies of the Opium-eater which have been mine. I remember another, bound in dark blue cloth, with copious notes. There was a third, the outside seeming of which I forget, but which I think formed part of two volumes of selections from De Quincey. I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang.

Why, the beggarliest miser alive can't think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already dispensed a few copies of the Opium-eater, price fourpence-halfpenny. As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of yesterday's morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to carry it off as a gift.

Yet if I am free with the

volume, I am jealous of the author. I do not mention his name to people I believe unwilling or unable to worship him becomingly.

But when I meet a true disciple what prodigal joy environs and suffuses me! What talks of him I have had, and speechless raptures in hearing of him! How thick with gold the air of evenings has been, spent with him and one who loved him! I recall one glorious summer's day, when an old friend and I (we were then, alas! years and years younger than we are to-day), had toiled on through mountain heather for hours, until we were half

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baked by the sun and famished with thirst. Suddenly we came upon the topmost peak of all the hills, and saw, many miles away, the unexpected sea. As we stood, shading our eyes with our hands, my companion chanted out, "Obliquely to the right lay the manylanguaged town of Liverpool; obliquely to the left the multitudinous sea."" "Whose is that?" I asked eagerly, notwithstanding my drought. "What isn't Shakespeare's is De Quincey's." "Where did you find it?" "In the Opium-eater." I remember cursing my memory because I had forgotten that passage. When I got home I looked through the copy I then had, and could not find the sentence. I wrote to my friend, saying I could not come upon his quotation. He answered that he now believed it did not occur in the body of the Confessions, but in a note in some edition, he could not remember which. What a sense of miserable desolation I had that this edition had never come my way!

There are only three marks of any kind in my present copy of the Confessions, one dealing

with the semi-voluntary power children have over the coming and going of phantoms painted on the darkness. This mark is very indistinct, and, as I remember nothing about it, I think it must have been made by accident. The part indicated by it is only introductory to an unmarked passage immediately following which has always fascinated my imagination. It is in the "Pains of Opium," and runs :

"In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp, friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before Edipus and Priambefore Tyre-before Memphis. And at the same time a corresponding change took place in my dreams: a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour."

How thankful we ought to be that it has never been our fate to sit in that awful theatre of prehistoric woes! There is surely nothing more appalling in the past than the interminably vain activities of that mysterious