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your lifetime perstringed many people, some of whom perstringed you, Sam, smartly in return."

"I (said Augustus Cæsar) found Rome built of brick; but I left it built of marble. Well, my man, we reply, for a wondrously little chap, you did what in Westmoreland they call a good darroch (day's work); and if navvies had been wanted in those days, you should have had our vote to a certainty. But Caius Julius, even under such a limitation of the comparison, did a thing as much transcending this," &c.

We must also give a specimen of his humorous "slangy" outrages on the dignity of criticism. The following occurs in his "Brief Appraisal of Greek Literature," which has not been reprinted :

"But all this extent of obligation amongst later poets of Greece to Homer serves less to argue his opulence than their penury. And if, quitting the one great blazing jewel, the Urim and Thummim of the Iliad" [Achilles], "you descend to individual passages of poetic effect; and if amongst these a fancy should seize you of asking for a specimen of the sublime in particular, what is it that you are offered by the critics? Nothing that we remember beyond one single passage, in which the God Neptune is described in a steeplechase, and making play' at a terrific pace. And certainly enough is exhibited of the old boy's hoofs, and their spanking qualities, to warrant our backing him against a railroad for a rump and dozen; but, after all, there is nothing to grow frisky about, as Longinus does, who gets up the steam of a blue-stocking enthusiasm, and boils us a regular gallop of ranting, in which, like the conceited snipe upon the Liverpool railroad, he thinks himself to run a match with Sampson; and whilst affecting to admire Homer, is manifestly squinting at the reader to see how far he admires his own flourish of admiration; and, in the very agony of his frosty raptures, is quite at leisure to look out for a little private traffic of rapture on his own account. But it won't do; this old critical posture-master (whom, if Aurelius hanged, surely he knew what he was about) may as well put up his rapture pipes, and (as Lear says) 'not squiny' at us; for let us ask Master Longinus, in what earthly respect do these great strides of Neptune exceed Jack with his seven-league boots? Let him answer that, if he can. We hold that Jack has the advantage."

Melody and Harmony.

The melody of De Quincey's prose is pre-eminently rich and stately. He takes rank with Milton as one of our greatest masters of stately cadence, as well as of sublime composition. If one may trust one's ear for a general impression, Milton's melody is sweeter and more varied; but for magnificent effects, at least in prose, the palm must probably be assigned to De Quincey. In some of De Quincey's grandest passages the language can be compared only to the swell and crash of an orchestra.

It need hardly be added that the harmony between his rhythm and his subject-matter is most striking in the sublime flights.

Taste.

De Quincey has been accused of crossing the bounds of good

taste in certain respects. His digressions and footnotes have been objected to. His punctilious precision in the use of terms has been called pedantic. He has been censured for carrying to excess what we have described as his favourite figure.. But especially he has been visited with severe condemnation for his offences in the pursuit of comic effect-more particularly in the use of slang. A recent critic has gone the length of describing his "slangy" apostrophes as "exquisite foolery."

KINDS OF COMPOSITION.

Description.

Though so many of De Quincey's papers are descriptive, and are properly designated sketches, he has really left us very little detailed description of external nature. The reason is to be found in his character. His interest was almost wholly engrossed by man. The description that he excelled in was description of the human form, feelings, and manners.

Where he does attempt the description of still life, notwithstanding his natural clearness and order, he is much inferior to Carlyle. He has one or two good points. He gives right and left in his pictures, and brings in such touches of precision as "standing on a different radius of my circular prospect, but at nearly the same distance: "—which is very significant, if not too scholastic. But if we take even such a studied piece as his description of the valley of Easedale, at the beginning of his "Recollections of the Lakes,' vol. ii., we miss the vividness of a master of the descriptive art. We receive no idea of such a fundamental fact as the size of the valley we are, indeed, presented rather with the feelings and reflections of a poetically-minded spectator, than with the material aspects of the scene.

Generally speaking, he describes nature only in its direct or figurative relations to man. A scene is interesting as "the very same spectacle, unaltered in a single feature, which once at the same hour was beheld by the legionary Roman from his embattled camp, or by the roving Briton in his wolf-skin vest.'" A hamlet of seven cottages clustering together round a lonely highland tarn, is interesting as suggesting seclusion from the endless tumults and angry passions of human society; the declining light of the afternoon, from its association with the perils and dangers of the night. Thus it happens that often, instead of describing he really expounds-expounds the thoughts that arise from the general features of a scene by force of association or of similitude. We see this in his description of the English Lake

scenery:

"But more even than Anne Radcliffe had the landscape-painters, so many and so various, contributed to the glorification of the English Lake district; drawing out and impressing upon the heart the sanctity of repose in its shy recesses its Alpine grandeur in such passes as those of Wastdalehead, Langdalehead, Borrowdale, Kirkstone, Hawsdale, &c., together with the monastic peace which seems to brood over its peculiar form of pastoral life, so much nobler (as Wordsworth notices) in its stern simplicity and continual conflict with danger hidden in the vast draperies of mist overshadowing the hills, and amongst the armies of snow and hail arrayed by fierce northern winters, than the effeminate shepherd's life in the classical Arcadia, or in the flowery pastures of Sicily."

An indifferent observer of nature, De Quincey was minute and precise in his observation of human beings. Every face that he met he seems to have watched with the vigilant attention of a Boswell. He has described the persons of many of his contemporaries. His most careful portraits are, perhaps, his Lake companions-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Wilson. To these must be added his delineation of the notorious murderer Williams. The reader that desires to see how watchful an eye he had for the smallest particularities of shape, look, and bearing, will do well to read his prefatory note on Coleridge, vol. xi.

It is in the description of the feelings that he particularly excels. Not only is he deeply learned in the proper vocabulary of the feelings; he had acquired by close study, and employs with exquisite skill, a profound knowledge of the outward manifestations of feeling in tone, feature, gesture, and conduct. In reading motives from what he would have called the dumb hieroglyphics of observed or recorded behaviour, and in tracing the succession of feelings that must have passed under given circumstances, he is one of our greatest masters. In this point more perhaps than in any other, he challenges the closest attention of the student.

A good specimen of his power is the passage in the Marr murder where he pictures Mary's feelings on her returning to the door and finding it locked :—

"Mary rang, and at the same time very gently knocked. She had no fear of disturbing her master or mistress; them she made sure of finding still up. Her anxiety was for the baby, who, being disturbed, might again rob her mistress of a night's rest; and she well knew that with three people all anxiously awaiting her return, and by this time, perhaps, seriously uneasy at her delay, the least audible whisper from herself would in a moment bring one of them to the door. Yet how is this? To her astonishment— but with the astonishment came creeping over her an icy horror-no stir nor murmur was heard ascending from the kitchen. At this moment came back upon her, with shuddering anguish, the indistinct image of the stranger in the loose dark coat whom she had seen stealing along under the shadowy lamplight, and too certainly watching her master's motions. Keenly she now reproached herself that under whatever stress of hurry she had not acquainted Mr Marr with the suspicious appearances. Poor girl! she did not then know that, if this communication could have availed to put Marr

upon his guard, it had reached him from another quarter; so that her own omission, which had in reality arisen under her hurry to execute her master's commission, could not be charged with any bad consequences. But all such reflections this way or that were swallowed up at this point in overmastering panic. That her double summons could have been unnoticed-this solitary fact in one moment made a revelation of horror. One person might have fallen asleep, but two-but three-that was a mere impossibility. And even supposing all three together with the baby locked in sleep, still how unacountable was this utter-utter silence! Most naturally at this moment something like hysterical horror overshadowed the poor girl; and now, at last, she rang the bell with the violence that belongs to sickening terror. This done, she paused. Self-command enough she still retained, though fast and fast it was slipping away from her, to bethink herself that, if any overwhelming accident had compelled both Marr and his apprentice-boy to leave the house in order to summon surgical aid from opposite quarters-a thing barely supposable-still, even in that case, Mrs Marr and her infant would be left, and some murmuring reply, under any extremity, would be elicited from the poor mother. To pause, therefore, to impose stern silence upon herself, so as to leave room for the possible answer to this final appeal, became a duty of spasmodic effort. Listen, therefore, poor trembling heart; listen, and for twenty seconds be as still as death. Still as death she was; and during that dreadful stillness, when she hushed her breath that she might listen, occurred an incident of killing fear, that to her dying day would never cease to renew its echoes in her ear."

Narrative.

De Quincey never attempted any continuous history. Taking his own division of history into Narrative, Scenical, and Philosophical, we see that he had special qualifications for the two last modes. But he wanted industry to take up a national history and pursue it continuously through all its stages. What he might have done we can guess only from speculations recorded incidentally in such papers as his account of the Cæsars, or of Cicero, or Charlemagne, and from the spectacular sketch of the Revolt of the Tartars.

He wrote several short biographies. In these he has at least the negative merit of not chronicling unimportant facts. They can hardly be called narratives; there is in them as little as possible of anything that could be called narrative art. They are, properly speaking, discussions of perplexities that have gathered about the story of the individual life, and descriptions of the various features of the character.

In his most imaginative tales, such as the "Spanish Military Nun," the facts are altogether secondary to the poetical embellishments are but the bare cloth on which he works his manycoloured tapestry of pathos, humour, and soaring rhapsodies.

Exposition.

De Quincey possessed some of the best qualities of an expositor, coupled with considerable defects.

The great obstacle to his success in exposition was the want of simplicity. He was, as we have seen, too persistently scholastic for the ordinary reader, making an almost ostentatious use of logical forms and scientific technicalities.

As his studious clearness is marred by an unnecessary use of unfamiliar words and forms of expression, so others of his merits in exposition must be stated with some abatement.

"A man,"

He was aware of the value of iterating a statement. he says, "who should content himself with a single condensed enunciation of a perplexed doctrine, would be a madman and a felo de se, as respected his reliance upon that doctrine." Yet he considered iteration a departure "from the severities of abstract discussion." "In the senate, and for the same reason in a newspaper, it is a virtue to reiterate your meaning: tautology becomes a merit; variation of the words, with a substantial identity of the sense and dilution of the truth, is oftentimes a necessity." But in a book, he held, repetition is rather a blemish, seeing that the reader may “return to the past page if anything in the present depends upon it." In this he was probably unpractical: doubtless the reader is saved much weariness by judicious repetition, although of course less is needed in a book than in a speech.

He knew also the value of stating the counter-proposition. In upholding the Ricardian law that the value of a thing is determined by the quantity of the labour that produces it, he broadly declares that the mere statement of the doctrine brings the student not one step nearer the truth, unless he is told what it is designed to contradict-namely, that the value of the thing is not determined by the value of the producing labour.

When he is thoroughly in earnest, and resolved to make an abstruse point clear to the meanest capacity, he knows how to proceed by means of simple examples and illustrations. This is well shown in his Dialogues on Political Economy. The misfortune is, that he is not always alive to the abstruseness of the question he happens to be dealing with, and consequently wears to many readers an air of repulsive incomprehensibility.

His power of clothing a dry subject with interest appears advantageously in his "Templar's Dialogues on Political Economy." In respect of varied interest, this fragment is equal to the dialogues of Plato.

In consequence chiefly of his abstruseness, he cannot be recommended as a model to the popular expositor. Yet his command of language, his precision, and his power of imparting interest, make him a profitable study if the student knows what to imitate and what to avoid.

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