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Greek drama adapts its monitory legends. The doctrine of the Hebrew Scriptures as to vicarious retribution is at times discovered secretly moving through the scenic poetry of Athens. His own crime is seen hunting a man through five generations, and finding him finally in the persons of his innocent descendants."

The tropical applying of abstractions to words expressing movement-see in the above passage "lurking," "moving," "hunting," &c.—is a prominent De Quinceyism. Ideas "lurk under" terms; distinctions "move obscurely" in the minds of men; revolutions "travel leisurely through their stages;" "the guardianship of civilisation suddenly unfolds itself like a banner over particular nations; a danger "approaches and wheels away threatens, but finally forbears to strike," &c. &c.

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The Sources of his Similitudes.-De Quincey's similitudes are drawn from an immense sphere of reading and observation. Without pretending to be exhaustive, we may mention separately some of his principal fields.

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(1.) The characteristics of lower animals. He very often enlivens an adjective of quality by appending a comparison to some animal possessing the quality in an extreme form. We are constantly meeting such phrases as restless as a hyena ;" phoenix;" "by original constitution strong as one of Meux's drayhorses;" "Burke, a hunting leopard, coupled with Schlosser, a German poodle." In owning himself baffled to find any illustratration of Richter's activity of understanding, he shows how deliberately he ransacked his knowledge in pursuit of similitudes :

"What then is it that I claim? Briefly, an activity of understanding so restless and indefatigable that all attempts to illustrate, or express it adequately, by images borrowed from the natural world, from the motions of beasts, birds, insects, &c., from the leaps of tigers or leopards, from the gambolling and tumbling of kittens, the antics of monkeys, or the running of antelopes and ostriches, &c., are baffled, confounded, and made ridiculous by the enormous and overmastering superiority of impression left by the thing illustrated."

(2.) Works of travel. A great reader of books of travel, he found in the customs and natural phenomena of foreign countries extreme examples, and thus was able to give to his similes a peculiar finish, and at times an independent value, such as attaches to some of the similes of Milton. Where for an image of hopeful change a less accomplished artist would simply make comparison to the opening of spring, De Quincey is able to cite the opening of spring in Sweden, and dwells upon a gorgeous picture of the sudden vernal outburst in that country. An unfinished book that another would compare simply to an unfinished building, he compares to "a Spanish bridge or aqueduct begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect;" opening up remote collateral reflections to the reader that has time to pause and consider.

Again, illustrating how soon we forget the features of dead or distant friends, he says

"The faces of infants, though they are divine as flowers on a savanna of Texas, or as the carolling of birds in a forest, are, like flowers in a savanna of Texas, or the carolling of birds in a forest, soon overtaken by the pursu ing darkness that swallows up all things human."

Again

"Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness.'

Once more

...the anarchy of dreams' presides in German philosophy; and the restless elements of opinion, throughont every region of debate, mould themselves eternally, like the billowy sands of the desert, as beheld by Bruce, into towering columns, soar upwards to a giddy altitude, then stalk about for a minute, all aglow with fiery colour, and finally unmould and 'dislimn,' with a collapse as sudden as the motions of that eddying breeze under which their vapoury architecture had arisen."

This last image was a favourite with him. He first used it in the article on Dr Parr :

"The brief associations of public carriages or inns are as evanescent as the sandy columns of the Great Desert, which the caprices of the wind build up and scatter, shape and unshape, within the brief revolution of a minute." He used it again in the preface to his 'Political Economy:'

"... or, like the fantastic architecture which the winds are everlastingly pursuing in the Arabian desert, would exhibit phantom arrays of fleeting columns and fluctuating edifices, which, under the very breath that had created them, would be for ever collapsing into dust."

(3.) He very often compares individuals to celebrated personages in literature, by a kind of synecdoche. One specimen must suffice:

"Here at this time was living Mr Clarkson,-that son of thunder, that Titan, who was, in fact, the one great Atlas that bore up the Slave Trade Abolition cause-now resting from his mighty labours and nerve-shattering perils."

(4.) The feats of magic furnish him with several expressions of astonishment. "Thaumaturgic" is a favourite word; he speaks of the "rhabdomantic" power of Christianity in evoking dormant feelings; and he compares the transformation worked by a lady upon her husband to the achievements of "some mighty caliph or lamp-bearing Aladdin."

(5.) From music he draws some very favourite metaphors. Thus: He knows "human despondencies through all their in

finite gamut." Christopher North at Oxford "enjoyed an unlimited favour with an infinite gamut of friends and associates, running through every key, the diapason closing full in groom, cobbler, and stable-boy." Ceylon is "a panorganon for modulating through the whole diatonic scale of climates."

(6.) He takes many metaphors from the technical language of law and trade. The question as to the comparative value of ancient and modern learning is "the great pending suit between antiquity and ourselves." "Such as these were the habits and the reversionary consolations of Pompey." "The other historic person on whom I shall probably be charged with assault and battery is Josephus." "The Jew did not receive the bribe first and then perpetrate the treason, but trusted to Roman good faith at three months after date." Writing of Pope's composing satire at the instigation of Warburton, he says:

"To enter a house of hatred as a junior partner, and to take the stock of malice at a valuation (we copy from advertisements), that is an ignoble act.” These metaphors are very often humorous. Thus

"A Canadian winter for my money; or a Russian one, where every man is but a co-proprietor with the north wind, in the fee-simple of his own

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(7.) Sometimes he takes a fancy to draw upon mathematics, medicine, or physical science. Thus

"As to Symmons, he was a Whig; and his covert purpose was to secure Milton for his own party, before that party was fully secreted by the new tendencies beginning to move amongst the partisanships of the age. Until Dr Sacheverel came, in Queen Anne's reign, the crystallisations of Whig and Tory were rudimental and incomplete. Symmons, therefore, was under a bias, and a morbid kind of deflection."

How far he observes the conditions of effective comparison.De Quincey is a model of exact comparison. To point out with deliberate some would say with tedious-scrupulosity the resembling circumstances in the things compared, peculiarly suits his subtilising turn of mind. He never seems to be in a hurry, and does not aspire to hit off a similitude in a few pregnant words; his characteristic is punctilious accuracy, regardless of expense in the matter of words.

Out of numerous available examples may be quoted his comparison of the distribution of men in Ceylon to the distribution of material in a peach ::

"But strange indeed, where everything seems strange, is the arrangement of the Ceylonese territory and people. Take a peach: what you call the flesh of the peach, the substance which you eat, is massed orbicularly round a central stone-often as large as a pretty large strawberry. Now, in Ceylon the central district, answering to this peach-stone, constitutes a

fierce little Lilliputian kingdom, quite independent, through many centuries, of the lazy belt, the peach-flesh, which swathes and enfolds it, and perfectly distinct by the character and origin of its population. The peach-stone is called Kandy, and the people Kandyans."

Seeing that he possessed an extraordinary power of "elevating" by means of similitudes, it is natural to ask whether he is ever guilty of undue exaggeration. When this question is put concerning De Quincey, attention turns at once to his Opium Confessions and his Autobiographic Sketches.' In these works he describes his own feelings in metaphors taken from the language of the great operations of Nature, and draws elaborate comparisons between momentous epochs in his own life, and such imposing phenomena as the uncontrollable migrations of the buffalo herds. Are these similitudes extravagantly hyperbolical? Do they offend the reader as rising extravagantly above the dignity of the subject? Much depends upon our point of view. If we view the autobiographer unsympathetically, from the stand-point of our own personality-if we regard him simply as a unit among the millions of mankind, a speck upon "the great globe itself,”—we shall undoubtedly be shocked at his venturing to compare revolutions within his own insignificant being to revolutions affecting vast regions of the earth. But if we view him as he means that we should view him, sympathetically, from the stand-point of his personality, we shall not be shocked at the audacity of his similitudes-we shall not consider them extravagant, or out of keeping with the feelings proper to the occasion. Epochs and incidents in our own life are more important to us, bulk more largely in our eyes, than epochs and incidents in the history of a nation. The violent death of a near and dear relative or friend touches us more profoundly than an earthquake at Lisbon, a massacre at Cawnpore, or a revolution in Paris. De Quincey says nothing that has not been felt more or less dimly by all human beings when he says, that on his entering Oxford the profound public interest concerning the movements of Napoleon "a little divided with me the else monopolising awe attached to the solemn act of launching myself upon the world."

Concerning the novelty or originality of his similitudes. He has never been accused of plagiarising. When he borrows a figure of speech, he gives a formal acknowledgment; at least he does so in some cases, and I have never seen any clandestine appropriations charged against him. "As I have never allowed myself," he says, "to covet any man's ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his, still less would it become a philosopher to covet other people's images or metaphors." And if he had, we might say, as he said of Coleridge's plagiarisms, that such robbery would have been an honour to the person robbed. We may be sure,

from the unique finish of his similitudes, that the stolen property would have improved in value under his hands.

QUALITIES OF STYLE.

Simplicity.

De Quincey cannot be ranked among simple writers. His style has certain elements of simplicity, but, at the same time, it has, in a considerable degree, every element of abstruseness specified in a manual of composition.

(1.) He makes an excessive use of Latinised, scholarly, and technical terms. Thus

"I myself, who have never been a great wine-drinker, used to find that half-a-dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the faculties, brightened and intensified the consciousness, and gave to the mind a feeling of being 'ponderibus librata suis.'

Concerning his 'Logic of Political Economy,' Mr M'Culloch says

It would have been more popular and successful had it been less scholastic. It is right to be logical, but not to be perpetually obtruding logical forms and technicalities on the reader's attention."

(2.) In his choice of subjects he prefers the recondite-offering, in this respect, a great contrast to Macaulay.

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In his Essays "addressed to the understanding as an insulated faculty," he runs after the most abstruse problems. Take the examples quoted in his preface to the first volume of his 'Collected Works.' In the "Essenes," he defends a new speculation on a puzzling subject with considerations familiar only to archæologic theologians. In his "Cæsars," his purpose is not so much a condensed narrative as an elucidation of doubtful points. His Essay on Cicero deals with problems of the same nature. And so with many others of his articles. The volume on 'Leaders in Literature,' wherever it keeps faithful to its title, is taken up mainly with the "traditional errors affecting them." Even his 'Autobiographic Sketches' turn aside upon various incidents to the pursuit of subtle speculations, such as disquisitions on the possible issues of an action, recondite analysis and conjecture of motives, consideration of delicate points of taste, nice investigation of the sources of the influence of a poem or a picture. His 'Logic of Political Economy' deals with the most puzzling and abstruse principles of the science.

(3.) So far from shirking-as is the manner of simple writers every call to modify a bare assertion, he revels in nice distinctions and scrupulous qualifications. This is a part of his

exactness.

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