Excerpt from The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 5
The first seven of the biographic sketches, it will be observed, relate to persons and subjects contemporary with De Quincey himself, so that in treating them he could draw from his own observations and recollections, and not merely, as in most of the biographies in last volume, from books and tradition. These seven, papers, accordingly, have been arranged pretty much in the order of their subjects. Dr. Parr comes first, as, though quite within De Quincey's memory and known to De Quincey by actual contact, yet on the whole more an eighteenth-century Object than a figure of the nineteenth; Miss Hawkins's Anecdotes, though some of them are scraps from the J ohnsonian world of the eighteenth century prior to Parr's connexion with it, may follow Parr, as coming from the memory of a lady who was Parr's junior; after which, in the Marquess Wellesley, Coleridge, Lamb, Professor Wilson, and Sir William Hamilton, we are distinctly among De Quincey's coevals. The last four, indeed, were personal friends of his, of whom he had again and again made mention in his writings, and of three of whom, - Coleridge, Lamb, and Wilson, - we have already had sketches from him in his Autobiographic Reminiscences. This reappearance of Coleridge, Lamb, and Wilson in the present volume, to be sketched again, with Sir William Hamilton now in their company, is, indeed, a feature of the volume that cannot escape remark. It is worth some atten tion on De Quincey's own account.
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