said. It was now about six o'clock, and he would be
home before nine.

This call on Mr. Hogg at Canonmills turned out of no
small importance in De Quincey's biography. Whether
it had been occasioned by any knowledge on De Quincey's
part that his connexion with Blackwood and Tait was com-
ing to an end, or merely by a wish to have a weekly pe-
riodical also at hand for the reception of smaller odds and
ends from his pen, certain it is that from 1849 the new
connexion all but superseded every other. There are no
known contributions by De Quincey to Blackwood after
1849. His only known contribution to Tait after that
date was a paper in three instalments, in 1851, entitled
"Lord Carlisle on Pope"; and, though The North British
Review is said to have counted De Quincey among its con-
tributors, his literary exertions in any such quarter were
but asides from his occupations for Mr. Hogg. Not, of
course, that these occupations consisted in mere contribu-
torship to Hogg's Instructor. That periodical—whether
under its original name, which it retained till 1856, or un-
der the more appalling name of Titan, which it adopted
in 1857—did indeed receive bright occasional contribu-
tions from De Qnincey.The most notable were a short
sketch of "Professor Wilson", in 1850; an article on "Sir
William Hamilton", in three portions, in 1852; a paper on
"California", in 1852; and one on "China", in 1857. But
what were a few stray articles in an Edinburgh weekly for
the last ten years of such a life as De Quincey's? How
had it come to pass, in fact, that a man for whose articles
all editors and all publishers in the British Islands, had
they been really deep in their craft, ought to have been
competing, had found it necessary, in his sixty-fifth year,
to pay that call at Canonmills with a manuscript in his

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