born Aug. 15, 1785, Manchester, Lancashire, Eng.
died Dec. 8, 1859, Edinburgh, Scot.
English essayist and critic.
While a student at Oxford he first took opium to relieve the pain of facial neuralgia. He became a lifelong addict, an experience that inspired his best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), whose highly poetic and imaginative prose has made it an enduring masterpiece of English style. As a critic he is best known for the essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" (1823).