Delinquency (if I may coin that word) and the Conditions of an English Leg-Puller

In 1821, like a messenger out of the dark (or literary leg-puller), English Opium-Eater arrived as if offering some saving play mind in an obdurately literalising age. He conflated two most reputedly chthonic regions: Hell, and East. The language was ravishing, precise, unpredictable, viscerally xenophobic (‘… China or Indostan … I kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; laid, confounded all unutterable slimy things …’). De Quincey not to be taken too seriously. But author ‘Confessions’ has inspired poised indignation. For example, for Albert Goldman, more taker than giver, least Wordsworth Coleridge's prolific plagiarist. Arguably though, such criticism looks unhelpfully hard-nosed when one considers self-consciousness Quincey's secondariness, deeply disturbed state his mind, counter-inflationary quality sense humour.