Thomas De Quincey's lively and controversial memoirs of his friends, the 'lake poets' William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, were controversial in their day for their candid and sometimes unflattering portraits of these great artists. The book remains one of the most fascinating ever written about this literary circle, and provides modern readers with a unique insight into what life amongst the literati of the early-nineteenth-century Lake District was like.

This electronic edition has been carefully prepared from the text of the first edition of 1862, and contains all the original illustrations.