EDITOR'S PREFACE Ir may be the chief recommendation of the present volume to a considerable number of readers that it overtakes at last the famous set of papers,-begun by De Quincey in a "First Essay" in 1827, continued in a "Second Essay" in 1839, and completed by a "Postscript" in 1854,-which bears the still startling name of Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. But the papers that follow in the volume are not without claims to admiration, even in so trying a companionship. It needed the imagination of a De Quincey to weave out of the real incidents of the perishing of two peasants, husband and wife, in a snow-storm among the Westmorland hills, such a legend of pathetic beauty for ever as is enshrined in his Memorials of Grasmere. Then, what a change of key, and what a revelation of another kind of dexterity, in his romance of The Spanish Military Nun! Here, it is true, he worked on materials ready to his hands; but it was his own art that rescued those materials from the comparative coarseness of their previous handling, and brought it about that, wherever the strange Spanish adventuress of the seventeenth century should be remembered, she should pass as a creation of De Quincey's. The little paper which comes next, called Sortilege and Astrology, is a specimen of De Quincey's cleverness in the invention of a light and playful bit of phantasy for a passing social occasion. Of The English Mail-Coach, in its three consecutive sections, what need to say more than that this is one of the papers which, by the suffrage of De Quincey's admirers all the world over, would be selected for preservation if it VOL. XIII B were necessary to limit the choice to those that would best transmit to future times an impression of some of his finest characteristics? To this succeeds the little cluster of fragments called Suspiria de Profundis. As De Quincey did not live to carry out fully his project of a pretty numerous series of papers under this collective name, and indeed disposed of some papers he had actually written for the series by publishing them separately and independently, the halfdozen pieces so reproduced in this volume are all that he left in print under that express designation. Remarkable pieces they are, three of them especially; but the crowning distinction of the whole cluster is derived from one in particular. Absolutely, and by universal admission, the little piece called "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," which we have put last among the Suspiria, is the finest thing that ever came from De Quincey's pen. So large a portion of the contents of the volume being thus representative of De Quincey in some of the most intimate and peculiar qualities of his genius, one may dwell a little here on two of those qualities in particular. While nearly all the chief writers in the long chronological list which summarises the literary history of the British Islands have been Humourists to some extent, only some have been wholly Humourists, or Humourists by such an overbalance in the general sum of their writings that one feels them to be sufficiently described all in all by that one name. Others have been Humourists only in the sense that portions of their writings have been of the humorous order, or that there has been an interfusion of the humorous here and there in their writings throughout. So far, therefore, as it may be desired to include De Quincey among the English Humourists, it must be in this modified, or nonexclusive, sense. In that sense, most certainly, he is to be included among our English Humourists. Of the incidentally humorous in his miscellaneous writings there have been examples in abundance through the preceding volumes. It is in the present volume, however, that the peculiar humour of De Quincey may be studied in some of its best specimens. Take |