 De Quincey wrote from personal familiarity, having known all three men during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.When he wrote about them twenty years later De Quincey ignored the constraints and repressions typical of biography in his era, and produced realistic and nuanced portraits.De Quincey was the first person to address the problem of plagiarism in Coleridge's works, a problem that was ignored or neglected until modern scholars began addressing it.