Amazon.com description: Product Description: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: V NOTES. THE ORIGINAL SOURCES. In Professor Masson's edition of De Quincey, Vol. VII, p. 8, is the following discussion of the author's original sources : " A word or two on De Quincey's authorities for his splendid sketch called The Revolt of the Tartars: — One authority was a famous Chinese state-paper purporting to have been composed by the Chinese Emperor, Kien Long himself (1735-1796), of which a French translation, with the title Monument de la Transmigration des Tourgouths des Bards de la Mer Caspienne dans I'Empire de la Chine, had been published in 1776 by the French Jesuit missionaries of Pekin, in the first volume of their great collection of Mlmoires concernant les Chinois. The account there given of so remarkable an event of recent Asiatic history as the migration from Russia to China of a whole population of Tartars had so much interested Gibbon that he refers to it in that chapter of his great work in which he describes the ancient Scythians. De Quincey had fastened on the same document as supplying him with an admirable theme for literary treatment. Explaining this some time ago, while editing his Revolt of the Tartars for a set of Selections from his Writings, I had to add that there was much in the paper which he could not have derived from that original, and that, therefore, unless he invented a great deal, he must have had other authorities at hand. I failed at the time to discover what these other authorities were, — De Quincey having had a habit of secretiveness in such matters ; but since then an incidental reference of his own, in his Homer and the Homeridce has given me the clue. The author from whom he chiefly drew such of his materials as were not supplied by the French edition of Kien Long's narrative, was, it appears from that reference, th...