Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1886 — De Quincey. [ARTICLE]

De Quincey.

Mr, Findlay’s recollections of De QuWicey have just been abroad, and prove to be interesting, if fragmentary and slight De Quinney’s devotion to opium is shown by one of Mr. Findlay’s anecdotes. “On one occasion,” lie says, “his foot had been affected by his taking large doses of opium; ‘in fact,’he said, ‘my leg is quite black, from the foot to considerably above the knee.’ He treated lightly my expressions of regret at such an alarming appearance, saying that he had had it before, and knew how far it would go, and how it could be got quit of. .The best cure, he said, would be to take six months’ walking; on which I said that his case was like that of St Denis: ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas que conte.’ How was he to begin this regimen ? He answered that by his leaving off opium, even for a few days, his leg would so far recover as to enable him to go out; but, he says, I cannot do that, for without opium I can’t go op with my work, which the publishers are urging me to complete. The work must be done; the opium can’t be left off; therefore I can not begin to Tvalk.” De Quincey’s dress was peculiar and far from attractive. His clothbs generally looked very old and as if they had been made for a person larger than himself, the reason being that he grew thinner in his later years, but still continued to wear the clothes made for him long before. “I have sometimes,” says Mr. Findlay, “seen appearances about him of a shirt and a shirt collar, but usually there were no indications of these articles of dress. When I came to visit him in his lodgings I saw him in .all stages of costume; sometimes he would come in to me from his bed-room to his parlor, as on this occasion, with shoes but no stockings, and sometimes With stockings but no shoes. ’’ Mr. Findlay saw him after his death “on the simple uncurtained pallet, whence in that last interview he had smilingly, with all those delicately polite regrets, said good-by, the tiny frame of this great dreamer lay stretched in his last long dreamless sleep. Attenuated to an extreme degree, the body looked infantile in size—a very slender stem for the shapely and massive head that crowned it. The face was little changed; its delicate bloom, indeed, was gone, but the sweet expression lingered, and the finely chiseled features were unaltered.” Mr. Findlay once found his friend in a chaos of books and MSS., and clouds of dust, searching for a missing document; and he adds: “The confusion of this sort in which he lived was marvelous. After his death Mrs. Craig told me that the mass of letters and notes, many unopened, to be gone over, was bewildering. In the heterogeneous heap, too, stray pound notes and packages of small coin in silver and copper were so numerous as when collected to form a considerable sum, Some of the notes were between the leaves of books; and parcels of coin had probably been handed to him as change, laid aside and forgotten. The task of looking over borrowed books and returning them to their owners, as far as these could be discovered, was also a heavy one.”