assigning to voices a wider range of notes than any voice of modern times can execute, is inscrutable. It was the custom of the age most frequently to construct an entire composition upon some well-known theme, and when the chants of the church were supposed to be exhausted as subjects for contrapuntal comprecation, secular songs were chosen for canti fermi even in sacred works. Thus the most famous composition of Deprès is the mass called "L'Homme Armé," from its being entirely based upon the national song of this name, at the time extremely popular. Another notable example of that strange perversion of art, in sacrificing its true object to merely technical display, is his mass of "Didadi," which is wrought upon a song in praise of dice. In this, artifice is carried to its utmost limit in the employment of every possible variety of measure (the signs of which, now obsolete, resemble in their arrangement the dots upon the die), so as to exemplify all the varieties of numbers in the game. Deprès wrote very voluminously; many of his works were printed in, and soon after his lifetime, and many more are preserved in the Vatican and other public libraries. Besides the collections of the music of this composer in the British Museum and at Oxford, there are also accessible to the English reader, some interesting specimens in vol. ii. of Hawkins' History; vol. ii. of that of Burney, and vol. i. of that of Busby.—G. A. M.
DE QUINCEY, Thomas: In those autobiographic sketches in which he has woven together, in an attractive web of fact and fiction, the main incidents of his early life, Mr. De Quincey has marked the day, but nowhere the precise year, of his birth. From collateral evidence, we infer that that event must have occurred on the 15th of August, 1785. He was the son of a Manchester merchant, who left a moderate fortune to be divided among a family of six children—a fortune which was, however, much impaired by the mismanagement of the guardians appointed to superintend it. The account he gives of the impression made upon him by the death of his eldest sister in his sixth year, presents the young De Quincey as a remarkably sensitive and precocious child. On his father's death in 1792, the family house at Rusholme was sold, and he went to reside with his mother at Bath. After distinguishing himself as a promising pupil at the grammar school of that city, he concluded the first period of his life as a scholar in a similar seminary at Winkfield in Wiltshire. In 1800 he went to Eton to join a youthful friend. Lord Westport, in an excursion to Ireland. Mr. De Quincey dates at this point his introduction to the world; and the account he has given of his journey indicates a mind prematurely open to lively impressions of men and manners, as well as of natural scenery. In the autumn of the same year he recrossed the channel, and proceeded through Birmingham to Laxton in Northamptonshire, the residence of Lady Carbery, an old friend of the family, who, by her mental energy and accomplishments, appears to have played an important part in stimulating the growth of his intellectual activities. On leaving Laxton he was sent to study for three years at the Manchester grammar-school, with the view of obtaining a bursary which might enable him the more easily to carry on his future studies at the university of Oxford. He has given a vivid description of the depression which weighed upon him, on being thrown back from the society of congenial minds, to mingle with schoolboys and share their drudgery. A nervous illness that overtook him at this period rendered the restraint more oppressive; and at the end of the first year after entering it, he adopted the resolution of suddenly leaving the school. he had quarrelled with his guardians, and, unknown to them, he determined to make for himself a way in the world. After rambling for some time among the Welsh mountains he went to London, and there encountered those romantic adventures which are preserved in the glowing colours of his "Confessions." Rescued by the intervention of some friends from the poverty and misfortune which gathered round him in the great city, he returned to St. John's Priory, near Chester, at that time the residence of his mother and one of his uncles. In 1803 he was entered at Oxford, and studied there intermittently for the space of five years. It was on the occasion of a third visit to London in 1804, that he was first led into the temptation of tasting opium, entering within a bondage which, with its varied pleasures and pains, became a part of his entire after-life. Towards the close of his university career, he made that acquaintance with several of his distinguished contemporaries, which he memorializes in the notices of them he has left to his readers. Coleridge he first saw at Bristol in 1807. In the course of the same year he visited Wordsworth and Southey at their seats in the lake country. In 1808 he himself became for ten or eleven years a permanent resident in the same neighbourhood. In 1832 he came to Scotland, and fixed his head quarters at Edinburgh, near which city he continued to reside till his death, which occurred 8th December, 1860.
Mr. De Quincey became widely known as the author of the "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," originally published in 1821. The peculiarity of the theme, and the deep interest of the narrative, brought it into general notice, and the passionate eloquence by which it is frequently marked attracted universal admiration. In the thirty or forty volumes of similar size which the author has since produced, there are few passages which equal, and none that surpass, the best of those in this earliest publication. A refined scholar, and a keen student of most modern languages, Mr. De Quincey led the way, as a reviewer of German literature, on a field where he was soon after eclipsed by a profounder critic. He executed several translations from Richter and Lessing for Blackwood and the London Magazine. He availed himself of Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister to make a virulent and somewhat ridiculous attack on its author, which appeared in the latter journal in 1824. During a series of years he contributed to the former a number of miscellaneous, critical, and historical essays. Other articles of his appeared in the Encyclopædia Britannica. His autobiographical sketches were contributed at a later period to Tait's Magazine. An edition of his collected essays was published several years ago in Boston; but the one now in course of publication by Messrs. Hogg, alone has received the authority of his revisal. It is entitled "Selections Grave and Gay," and has already attained to a thirteenth volume.
Among voluminous writers, few have undertaken to illustrate a greater number of subjects than Mr. De Quincey, but he has carried with him through all the same peculiarities of style and treatment, and whatever theme he handles, gains or loses by his marked excellencies and defects. The two transcendent powers of his mind are imagination and ingenuity. His purely imaginative writings take rank among the highest of their kind, as specimens from the border-land of poetry and prose. They have a claim to this position from their depth of conception, the intensity of realization which they manifest, and from the richness of their expression. De Quincey's best prose will bear comparison with the prose of Milton, Taylor, or Hooker; it has the same gorgeous roll in its music—the same passionate abundance of thought. Among his triumphs in this direction are the first chapters of the "Autobiography;" "The Earlier Suspiria;" "The English Mail Coach;" "The Three Madonnas;" "The Sphinx;" and pieces of criticism on Greek tragedy. He is the master-builder of dreams; the finest section of the "Confessions" is the last, where he recalls and reconstructs, as with an enchanter's wand, the array of fantastic phantoms which passed before him in his opium trances. It has the same mysterious beauty in prose that "Kubla Khan" possesses in verse. Some of the later "Suspiria," as also the conclusion of "Joan of Arc," and other rhapsodies, indicate the decline of this power, where the love of effect is divorced from sincerity of feeling, and the writing tends to degenerate into an artificial mosaic of melodious words. His creative ingenuity is prominent in his account of the "Mar Murders," and in that wonderful piece of imaginary history the "Tartar Revolt." There is a combination of humour with an air of intense reality in the former, which recalls De Foe; while there are scenes in the latter only to be paralleled in the Syracusan chapters of Thucydides. This same faculty appears in a more exclusively analytic form in some of his speculative papers, and in his various criticisms. (See the paper on "Murder as a fine art;" that on "Secret Societies," his theory of the Essenes, and his interpretation of the puzzle regarding Ælius Lamia.) His strength consists in the perfection of those two faculties—imagination and ingenuity; his weakness in their excess; where they require to be corrected by a love of truth, and balanced by an equal mind, he is apt to fail conspicuously. He has neither the candour nor the methodical accuracy which are essential to the just comprehension of history. He is wanting in grasp and power of abstraction—qualities inseparable from a genuine philosopher. Mr. De Quincey has the taint of self-consciousness more deeply perhaps than any other writer of the present day. He never forgets himself in any subject;
