Thomas De Quincey traded in the lives of poets. Above all, he capitalized on his youthful enthusiasm for William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he regarded and helped to establish as the leading literary figures of his century: the “first generation” of the family we call “English Romanticism.” Wordsworth he considered “the great poet of the age” (R 116), and it was this recognition, rather than his own body of published work (extending to more than fourteen volumes), on which he staked his highest pretensions to literary fame. Neither Wordsworth's confidant nor the first critic to praise him, De Quincey represented himself as the privileged auditor of a “profound secret”: that, as Coleridge claimed, Wordsworth's “fame belongs to another age, and can neither be accelerated or retarded” (R 117; BL 2:158). For De Quincey, the prospect of that other age was figured in regress from the age of reason to the condition of minority. His dispersed autobiographical writings cast him as an epiphenomenon of the Lake School, interpreting the infantilized abasement to genius as the possession of a precious, albeit thematically limiting, literary property. That gesture is confirmed by his standing in the academic canon of Romanticism, which, in its various nineteenth-and twentieth-century permutations, has gradually relegated De Quincey to the secure but secondary position of a significant minor writer.