ranging through many varieties of grave and gay. He applied this transfiguring process to the incidents of his own life not inventing romantic or comical incidents, but dwelling upon certain features of what really took place, and investing them with lofty, tender, or humorous imagery. So with his friends and casual acquaintances. He was sufficiently observant of what they really did and said, was remarkably acute in divining what passed in their minds, and felt the disagreeable as well as the agreeable points of their character; but he had the power of abstracting from the disagreeable circumstances. He fixed his imagination upon the agreeable side of an acquaintance, and transmuted the mixed handiwork of nature into a pure object of asthetic pleasure.1 His pleasures, we have said, were not boisterous. He had not the constitution for hearty enjoyment of life. In his Sketches he describes himself as being, in his boyhood, "the shiest of children," "constitutionally touched with pensiveness," "naturally dedicated to despondency." From his repose of manners he was a privileged visitor to the bedroom of his dying father. was passionately fond of peace, had "a perfect craze for being despised "-considering contempt as the only security for unmolested repose-and always tried to hide his precocious accomplishments from the curiosity of strangers. All his life through he retained this shyness. He had splendid conversational powers, and never was silent from timidity, at least when under the influence of his favourite opium; and yet he rather avoided than courted society. He humorously tells us how he was horrified at a party in London when he saw a large company of guests filing in one after the other, and divined from their looks that they had come to "lionise" the Opium-Eater. Mr Hill Burton represents the difficulty of getting him out to literary parties in Edinburgh in spite of his most solemn promises; and we have from Professor Masson a pleasant instance of his shyness to recognise a new acquaintance in the street, and of his nervousness when he found himself the subject of observation.

He

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Such a man often contracts strong special attachments. some of the impassioned records of the Confessions and the 'Autobiographic Sketches,' we have evidence of the strength of De Quincey's affections. In writing of living friends, he usually practises a delicate reserve, and veils his tenderness under the mask of humour. Yet even to this there are some exceptions, such as the touching address to his absent wife in the Opium Confessions. In writing of departed friends, he pours out his feelings without reserve. His sister Elizabeth, the outcast Anne,

1 It is not meant that he was so unlike other men as to be doing this constantly; only that he seized upon and transfigured actual objects into ideals much more than the generality of intellectual men.

the infant daughter of Wordsworth, and his unfortunate friend Charles Lloyd, may be mentioned as objects that at different periods of his life engrossed his affections, and whose loss he deplores with impassioned sorrow.

He has sometimes been accused of letting his imagination dwell too favourably upon himself-of being especially vain. Now we call a man vain when he pretends to something that he does not possess, or when he makes an ostentatious display of his possessions. It has not been alleged that De Quincey was vain in the first and worst sense; he has never been accused of exaggerating for the purpose of extorting admiration. But it is alleged that he was vain in the second sense; that he makes a complacently ostentatious display of his ancestral line, of his aristocratic connections, of his romantic adventures, of his philosophical knowledge, of his wonderful dreams. Such a charge could hardly be made but by a hasty or an undiscriminating reader. In the 'Autobiographic Sketches' we are never complacently invited to admire. We never think of the writer as a self-glorified hero, unless we are all the more jealous of being thrown into the shade. We are taken into his confidence, but he challenges our sympathy, not our admiration. He often speaks of himself humorously, but never with ostentatious complacency. He treats himself with no greater favour than any of the other subjects of his narrative. The truth seems to be, that he who observed. and speculated upon every human creature that came under his notice, observed and speculated most of all upon himself as the human creature that he was best acquainted with. He was too discerning a genius to be unconscious of his own excellence, and too little of a humbug to pretend that he was.

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As he has been accused of vanity, so he has sometimes been accused of arrogance, upon à still graver misconception of his shy, retiring nature, and his humorous self-irony. His dogmatic judgments of Plato, Cicero, Dr Johnson, and other eminent men, and his strong expressions of national and political prejudice, are sometimes quoted as signs of a tendency to domineer. may safely be asserted that whoever takes up this view has not penetrated far into the peculiar personality of De Quincey. Whatever might be the strength of his expressions, and these were often exaggerated for comic effect, there have been few men of equal power more unaffectedly open to reasonable conviction. When he had made up his mind, he took a pleasure, usually a humorous pleasure, in putting his opinion as strongly as possible; but that was no index as regarded his susceptibility to new light. This we may reasonably infer from his character as revealed in his works; and if we need further evidence, we have it in the words 1 The two last are mentioned in papers that have not been reprinted

of

of his personal acquaintance Mr Burton, who speaks of his "gentle and kindly spirit," and his boyish ardour at making a new discovery. Equally mistaken is the charge of jealousy, which comes from some admirers of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He always, and with obvious sincerity, professed an admiration for the extraordinary qualities of these men, but he knew exactly where their strength lay; he knew that both were men of special strength combined with special infirmity, and in his " Recollections them, while doing all justice to their merits, he did not scruple to expose their faults. On this ground he is charged with jealousy. But before we admit a charge so inconsistent with what we know of his character otherwise, it must be shown that his criticisms are unfair, or that they contain anything that can be construed into an evidence of malice. Had De Quincey been a jealous, irritable man, instead of being "gentle and kindly" as he was, the universally attested arrogance and contemptuous manner of Wordsworth would have driven him to take part with the Edinburgh Review,' and in that case the great poet's reputation might have been considerably delayed.

I have dwelt at disproportionate length upon two qualities that are not marked in De Quincey's character, simply for the reason that unappreciative critics have described them as the ruling emotions of his personal reminiscences. To discuss them at such length without a guarding statement would create misconception. We may say, in loose terms, that two kinds of emotion almost engrossed his imagination, and that these, in the peculiar form they assumed in De Quincey, were diametrically antagonistic and inevitably destructive to emotions so petty as vanity or jealous egotism. These two ruling emotions may be vaguely described as humour and sublimity.

Chris

Though naturally unfitted for rough merriment, for Teufelsdroeckh laughter, De Quincey had a keen sense of the ridiculous. None of his papers are without humorous strokes, and some of them are extravagantly humorous from beginning to end. topher North began to take opium, but desisted upon finding, as he said, that it destroyed his moral sensibilities, and put him into such a condition of mind that he was ready to laugh at anything, no matter how venerable. It is sometimes said that opium had a similar effect upon De Quincey. But, as he would have delighted to point out, a distinction must be drawn as regards laughter at things venerable: the laugh may be malicious, designed to bring a venerable object into contempt, or it may be humorous, revolving simply upon its own extravagance-degradation of the object being manifestly serious and ill-natured in the one case, and manifestly whimsical and good-natured in the other. There is not a trace of malice in De Quincey's laughter. It is, as he

described it himself, merely "humorous extravagance." He is a humourist, not a satirist. Sometimes he treats venerable persons or institutions with playful banter. Sometimes, by a kind of inverse process, he takes a pleasure in speaking of mean occupations with expressions of mock dignity. One unique vein of his humour consists in speaking with affection or admiration, or with a dry business tone, concerning objects usually regarded with horror and indignation. Whatever he does, as we shall see when we come to exemplify his humour, he does all with good-nature. He seldom applies his banter to living persons, and then in such a way that none but very touchy subjects could take offence. Indeed, so playful and stingless is his humour, that many profess themselves unable to see anything to laugh at in his peculiar extravagances. In humour, of course, everything depends upon the reader's attitude of mind. De Quincey's own answer to his censors is complete: "Not to sympathise is not to understand; and the playfulness which is not relished, becomes flat and insipid, or absolutely without meaning."

His genius for the sublime is unquestioned. He was singularly open to impressions of grandeur. As in his humour, so in his susceptibility to sublime effects, it is difficult for an energetic people like us to lower ourselves into this peculiar state of mind. I say to lower ourselves, for the effort implies a diminution of our active energies and the intensifying of our passive susceptibilities. One of the best ways of understanding De Quincey in his sublime moods is to contrast him with Carlyle in his so-called hero-worship. The attitude of mind in worship, as usually understood, is a passive attitude-an attitude of reverential prostration, of adoring contemplation. If this be so, the term worship is incorrectly applied to Carlyle's attitude, and applies with much greater propriety to De Quincey's. Carlyle's state of mind seems to be a state of exalted activity. A man of force and vigour, he seems to sympathise with the efforts of his heroes-to feel himself, in thinking of them, exalted to the same pitch of victorious energy. Now this is not a state of prostration, of adoration, but the highest possible state of ideal activity-the moment of success in imaginary Titanic effort. On the contrary, De Quincey's attitude is essentially an attitude of adoration, of awe-struck passivity. He lies still, as it were,-remains quiescent; passively allows magnificent conceptions to enter his mind and dwell there. Carlyle's hero-worship is more the intoxication of power than the worship of power, the sublime of egotism more than the sublime of adoration. The vision of great manifestations of power seems to act upon the one as a stimulant, upon the other as a narcotic, conspiring with the subduing influence of "all-potent opium."

The power that walks in darkness, that leaves for the imagina

tion a wide margin of "potentiality," is more impressive than power with a definite limit. Accordingly De Quincey tells us that "his nature almost demanded mystery."

The pleasing astonishment inspired by visions of grandeur is nearly allied to awe, and awe passes readily into panic dread. This De Quincey experienced in his opium-dreams. "Clouds of gloomy grandeur overhung his dreams at all stages of opium, and, in the last, grew into the darkest of miseries." His dreams were tumultuous "with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. Sometimes gorgeous spectacles, "such as never yet were beheld by waking eye," suddenly gave place to "hurrying trepidations." Sometimes he was filled with apprehensions of frightful disaster, while kept motionless by "the weight of twenty Atlantics."

As regards the sensuous framework of De Quincey's emotions, it is interesting to notice his peculiar sensibility to the luxuries and grandeurs of the ear. He was not insensible to the "pomps and glories" of the eye, but the ear was his most highly endowed sense. This is his own analysis. He recognised, he said, his sensibility to music as rising above the common standard by various tests-"by the indispensableness of it to his daily comfort, the readiness with which he made any sacrifices to obtain a 'grand debauch' of that nature, &c. &c." He might have mentioned as a good confirmation that he broke through the traditional explanation of Eschylus's "multitudinous laughter of the boundless ocean," as referring to the visual appearance of the waves, and asked whether it might not refer to the sounds of the ocean. For him the image would have had a greater charm if referred to the ear. One of his favourite pleasures of "imagination" (if we may use the word in a sense not exactly warranted by its derivation) was to construct ideal music out of the sounds of nature. "Often and often," he says, "seating myself on a stone by the side of the mountain-river Brathay, I have stayed for hours listening to the same sound to which so often C- Land I used to hearken together with profound emotion and awe-the sound of pealing anthems, as if streaming from the open portals of some illimitable cathedral; and many times I have heard it of a quiet night, when no stranger could have been persuaded to believe it other than the sound of choral chanting-distant, solemn, saintly."

When we view De Quincey on the active side, we find a great deficiency, corresponding to his intense occupation with the exercise of the analytic understanding and the imagination, both in the study and in the actual world. He was signally wanting in the pushing activity of the English race. Very characteristic is what he tells us of his boyhood, that when he was ordered to do a thing,