The five essays presented here-Rhetoric, Style, Language, Conversation, and Greek Literature-were published together for the first time in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey in 1889-1890. Frederick Burwick brings the essays together again in this volume, introducing them by tracing the sources and development of a belletristic theory of rhetoric, which he says is one of the most original, and for a few critics, the most puzzling of the nineteenth century. Burwick makes the edition complete with a comprehensive index and a selected bibliography.