De Quincey puts Stewart "among the armies of Hyder-Ali and his son with oriental and barbaric pageantry," in Paris during the revolution, Lapland, "the solitary forests of Canada," "the deserts of Asia and America," etc. John Taylor - "Oculist to the Prince of Wales" - places him in Persia, Armenia, and walking to Edinburgh to talk to Dugald Stewart. Rumor adds Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, he was simultaneously present in various locations in London. De Quincey:
In 1812 it was I think that I saw him for the last time; and by the way, on the day of my parting with him, had an amusing proof in my own experience of that sort of ubiquity ascribed to him by a witty writer in the London Magazine: I met him and shook hands with him under Somerset-house, telling him that I should leave town that evening for Westmoreland. Thence I went by the very shortest road (i.e. through Moor-street, Soho--for I am learned in many quarters of London) towards a point which necessarily led me through Tottenham-court-road; I stopped nowhere, and walked fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham-court-road I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible), but overtook Walking Stewart.
That is, there is the vague suggestion of X-Men-like mutant superpowers (teleportation? time-bending? or perhaps ubiquity itself), no doubt of advantage to a philosopher.
