Friedrich August Schulze, to give him his real name, was born in Dresden on June 1st, 1770. His father was a banker who, in the course of the Spanish Succession War, made some unfortunate speculations and fled the country. His widow struggled courageously to continue the business, and, as no tidings came of her husband, married again. Friedrich's mother and stepfather intended him for a commercial life, but he himself longed for an academic career. At the age of twenty-seven he went to Leipzig University, which he left in 1800. Next year appeared his Mann auf Friersfuessen.' After a short experience of Berlin he returned to Dresden, edited an evening paper, and became acquainted with Tieck and Schlegel. His humorous sketches were more popular with the public than his dramatic pieces. In 1807 he became an official in the Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce Deputation, but continued to write. 'Die Reise ins Schlaraffenland' is an evidence of his feelings in the struggle for national independence. In 1820 he was appointed Commissionsrath. When Tieck returned to Dresden in 1829 he found in Schulze the same taste for quiet and retirement as before. By strict adherence to temperate living he enjoyed almost unbroken good health. His writings fill about two hundred volumes, mostly stories with backgrounds of history and phantasy. Jean Paul is said to have advised him to use more time and less paper in his literary work. Schulze issued his 'Memoiren' in 1837, and in 1843 a selection of his writings in six volumes, for which Tieck wrote an introduction. Schulze died September 4th, 1849,

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in Dresden. He wrote mostly under the name of Friedrich Laun, but also used the pseudonyms of Jeremias, Felix Wohlgemuth, Helldunkel and Christian Heinrich Spiess.

The story of "The Somnambulist" is sufficiently farcical. A young lady has a lover who is unjustly considered objectionable by her elderly guardian and his sister. Whilst the lovers are going through a balcony scene the lady accidentally falls from the balcony into her lover's arms. The guardian and his sister, who are both afraid of ghosts, hear the lady's shriek, but on examining the rooms find only the open window. When this is closed the lady's ingress to the house is barred. The heroine and her lover go to seek a ladder at the gardener's house, but his wife, on the look out for thieves, purposely leaves a door open, and when they enter locks them in and rushes off to apprise the guardian of her capture of felons. The lovers, however, escape with the ladder, and as the young lady reaches the window she startles her guardian, who rushes off in the belief that he has seen a ghost. She has been followed by a police spy named Slippery Dick, whose appearance frightens her, and he in turn is confronted by the lover. As the two last are already in confederation a story is concocted to baffle the guardian. The gardener's wife cannot of course produce her captives, and is accused of hoaxing. Slippery Dick persuades the guardian that the young lady is a somnambulist and that the young officer has protected both her life and her good name, and so all ends happily.

"The Somnambulist" has all the mark, I repeat,

of De Quincey's workmanship. It is almost impossible to suppose that when German was so little known as in the year 1824 Charles Knight should have had two friends both of whom were acquainted with the writings of Friedrich Laun, for whom no one claims first rank or importance, and both of whom were willing to undergo the fatigue of transforming his German into whimsically humorous English. The digressions, the odd turns of humorous phrase, the quotation from Coleridge, the foot-note as to the opinions of the Bishop of C- (meaning no doubt Blomfield, then at the height of his classical reputation) on the Grecian ejaculation in comedy and tragedy, all point to the Opium Eater as the transformer of this trifle of German comedy into a piece of English humour.

In a letter already mentioned, written to Hessey by De Quincey in September, 1824, he mentions that he has " done a great deal of an article" to be called Epist. Critica No. 1. "It will contain," he says: (1) "Dibdin with whom I have had some good fun. (2) Agamemnon and the Birds. (3) Boeckh, 'Polit. Econo. of the Athenians.' (4) 'Q. Review 'blunders of. I am certain of making it an effective article. Dibdin I have done." The article on Dibdin appeared in the London Magazine' of January, 1825, after Taylor and Hessey had sold that periodical. The MS. was probably transferred with the copyright of the magazine. The article is an amusing parody of the stilted style of Thomas Frognall Dibdin's Library Companion,' an article in which all that is said of books is applied to boots and all the praise of libraries is turned on boot

shops.* Dibdin's passion for annotation and for annotations upon his own annotations is amusingly parodied in a page that has a four-stepped terrace of notes and notes upon notes.

In January, 1834, there appeared in Tait's Magazine' an article on "Animal Magnetism," which was certainly written by De Quincey. The proof is a passage embedded in a paper on the same topic in Tait' of July, 1838:

"It will save many of our readers a world of trouble if, at the outset of this paper, we recall to their recollection. an article on animal magnetism which appeared in a former number of this magazine from the able, and on this subject at once psychological and physiological-the congenial pen of Mr. De Quincey."

And a footnote gives the precise reference to the number for January, 1834. If this passage be regarded as an editorial addition, the possibility is not excluded that the second article also came from the pen of the Opium Eater. As to the first there can be no doubt. The object of De Quincey in writing it was to give some fresh information to English readers on the subject of Mesmer and the curative claims of his system of animal magnetism. At that time the strongly adverse report of the French Academy of Sciences was practically the only source of information, and its adverse conclusions had been incorporated in English books of reference, whilst later information. had been generally ignored. This report, as De Quincey points out, took the short cut of denying the

* I have given a fuller account of this in The Library' for July, 1907, pp. 267-274.

evidence. All the phenomena attributed to animal magnetism were set down to imagination pure and simple. But in 1826 the question was reopened, and there was a fresh investigation by the medical section of the academy. It is the report of this committee with which De Quincey mainly deals in the article that has so far eluded his biographers and bibliographers. The second article is a review of Baron Dupotet's Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism,' which appeared in an English translation in 1838, with an appendix containing the experiences of English medical men who were favourable to the claims put forward by the medical mesmerists. Of Mesmer, the founder of the system and the inventor of the name of animal magnetism, De Quincey has a very unfavourable opinion :

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"Mesmer, the reviver of animal magnetism in modern times, so far from possessing those endowments of caution and scientific scepticism which were essential to the conciliation of the public attention in an enlightened age and to the propitiation of the incredulous temper and the spirit of ridicule always so active in Parisian society, was in an extravagant degree distinguished by all the qualities of mysticism and quackery fitted to bring any science into contempt. He belonged by the features of his mind to the earliest ages of European culture. Both in his scientific views and his personal arrogance he presented an impersonation of all the bad qualities distributed in different ages, amongst Apollonius of Tyana-the worst of the Thaumaturgic Platonists-Paracelsus and Cardan, whilst apparently he had very little of the talent which so eminently distinguished most of these men. And hence it followed, though perhaps in a season of more public leisure in Paris such a result would not have followed, that the hostility which he had provoked, expressing itself through