A FORGOTTEN CLASSIC.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5462, 14 January 1896, Page 2

A FORGOTTEN CLASSIC.

It is perhaps too much to. say that >De Quincey is .a forgotten author; but among his (contemporaries * there .are several without any claims to his industry and ability who are better known and far more widely read. A Mr James Hogg has just made an elaborate attempt to bring under the notice of the public the literary merits of "The English Opium Eater," by issuing in sixteen volumes a complete edition of his works. He has collected manuscript from every available source, and. in his anxiety to do justice to his author's memory has inserted practically everything that he ever wrote, including his college exercises and some hastily-written essays of the most ephemeral interest. As more than one reviewer has pointed out, Mr Hogg has shown a sad want of discrimination in his method of procedure. De Quincey was an unusually fluent writer, and could turn his pen to any subject, the consequence being that his work, as a whole, varies much more in point of merit and universal interest than that of such authors as Macaulay and Carlyle. A judiciously-selected edition of his essays and confessions would have been far more useful in keeping green the memory of one whom no lover of English literature would, willingly neglect. As it is, the probable effect of Mr Hogg's bulky volumes will be to interest only a small minority of the reading public. The work of De Quincey which shows his powers at their highest is undoubtedly the volume which he gave to the world under the title of " The Confessions of an English Opium Eater." A majority of readers would willingly part with all the other fifteen volumes for the one containing this masterpiece. It tells how the future essayist and philosopher ran away from home, and as a consequence of his hasty act Bpent months in London on the verge of starvation. It describes how the opium habit wrought first magnificent and afterwards deadly effects on a brain and heart that had been too-long compelled to struggle against poverty and want. The dreams he dreamed under the influence of the drug, the sights he saw and the visions that haunted him are painted with a master hand, and will live after the facts of his life and the more philosophic parts of his work have been forgotten. The pity is that his well-meaning but injudicious admirer should have attempted to cumber his literary monument with matter that would better have been lopped away.