WORKS.  De Quincey’s works may be divided into two general classes.  The first includes his numerous critical articles, and the second his autobiographical sketches.  All his works, it must be remembered, were contributed to various magazines, and were hastily collected just before his death.  Hence the general impression of chaos which we get from reading them.

From a literary view point the most illuminating of De Quincey’s critical works is his. Literary Reminiscences.  This contains brilliant appreciations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, and Landor, as well as some interesting studies of the literary figures of the age preceding.  Among the best of his brilliant critical essays are On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth (1823), which is admirably suited to show the man’s critical genius, and Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827), which reveals his grotesque humor Other suggestive critical works, if one must choose among such a multitude, are his Letters to a Young Man (1823), Joan of Arc (1847), The Revolt of the Tartars (1840), and The English Mail-Coach (1849).  In the last-named essay the “Dream Fugue” is one of the most imaginative of all his curious works.

Of De Quincey’s autobiographical sketches the best known is his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).  This is only partly a record of opium dreams, and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us of De Quincey’s own life and wanderings.  This should be followed by Suspiria de Profundis (1845), which is chiefly a record of gloomy and terrible dreams produced by opiates.  The most interesting parts of his Suspiria, showing De Quincey’s marvelous insight into dreams, are those in which we are brought face to face with the strange feminine creations “Levana,” “Madonna,” “Our Lady of Sighs,” and “Our Lady of Darkness.”  A series of nearly thirty articles which he collected in 1853, called Autobiographic Sketches, completes the revelation of the author’s own life.  Among his miscellaneous works may be mentioned, in order to show his wide range of subjects, Klosterheim, a novel, Logic of Political Economy, the Essays on Style and Rhetoric, Philosophy of Herodotus, and his articles on Goethe, Pope, Schiller, and Shakespeare which he contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

De Quincey’s style is a revelation of the beauty of the English language, and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the Victorian Age.  It has two chief faults,—­diffuseness, which continually leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it.  Notwithstanding these faults, De Quincey’s prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in our language.  Though he was profoundly influenced