Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 423
ature, with his strange adventures, his still stranger
existence, the pseudo-high life of his beginning,
the pitiful and hopeless poverty of his end. We
get to feel, as we pursue the course of the corre-
spondence, a painful and pitying sense of all the
straits which he details at full length in every par-
ticular, with a kind of curious pleasure in the un-
folding of these poor and dreadful secrets. Poverty
is sometimes a noble and respectable thing, and when
the issues have any sort of greatness there is a kind
of excitement in the alternate downfalls and successes
of the penniless but courageous struggle. But when
the strife is for a few pounds, when the milkman's
bill is the rock in the way, and shillings and pence
the munitions of war, the echo of that dreary
and hopeless fighting in the dark has nothing but
misery in it. De Quincey puts forth his privations,
his wanderings about from one lodging to another,
sometimes waylaid in his bed by a furious creditor,
sometimes suffering torture for want of a box of
seidlitz powders, always with elaborate explana-
tion of how in the extraordinary combinations of
fate it has come to be so, but can never by any
calculation of human probabilities be so again — to
the publisher who never seems to refuse the necessary
dole, but inevitably is sometimes a little impatient
and provoked by the perpetual messengers and the
dole on the other side of a page or two at a time.
It was through Wilson, who knew De Quincey while
he lived, a worshipper, satellite, and critic of the
band of poets in the Lake Country, that he was
first introduced to Mr Blackwood and the Maga-
zine : but from the first the relations between this