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" of them, while doing all justice to their merits, he did not scruple to expose their faults. On this ground he is charged with jeal ousy. 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. 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. Christopher 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 44 described it himself, merely "humorous extravagance." He is 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 A man of force and vigour, he to be a state of exalted activity. seems to sympathise with the efforts of his heroes-to feel himself, in thinking of them, exalted to the same pitch of victorious Now this is not a state of prostration, of adoration, energy. but the highest possible state of ideal activity-the moment of On the contrary, De Quinsuccess in imaginary Titanic effort. cey'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 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 Cand 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." ear. 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, instead of forthwith rushing off to do it, or stubbornly refusing obedience, like an active English child, he first made sure that he exactly understood the mandate, bothering his superior to express himself with scrupulous precision of language. He took little interest in the practical "questions" of the day. He is said to have written, about 1821, a criticism of Lord Brougham under the title of "Close Comments on a Straggling Speech;" but this, one may guess, was more humorous than practical. On one occasion he professed to "descend from his long habits of philosophical speculation to a casual intercourse with fugitive and personal politics"-namely, in 1835, when he wrote his "Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism" for 'Tait's Magazine.' Here, however, quite as much as elsewhere, he is still the abstract philosopher, not the man of practice: he expressly refuses to discuss the policy of the rival parties on any particular question, and confines himself to an original exposition of their abstract creeds, their mutual relations to the British Constitution. So little practical interest did he take in the current business of the nation, that at one time he acknowledges that he had not read a newspaper for three years. One must almost suppose that he informed himself of the proceedings of existing parties with no livelier interest than he took in the proceedings of parties in ancient Greece or Rome. His habits seem to have been very irregular. He did not want steadiness of application to special studies; he did not roam restlessly from field to field, but set himself down to a subject, and mastered it, not content till he had read everything that he could find upon the particular subject. But he hated the labour of producing, at times with an absolute loathing. He wrote nothing till forced by pecuniary embarrassment. In the course of some remarks on Coleridge, he says that it is characteristic of an opiumeater to finish nothing that he begins; and his own works to some extent bear out this humorous principle. 66 Mr Hill Burton gives an interesting picture of his indifference to the ordinary ways of human business. Only immediate craving necessities could ever extract from him an acknowledgment of the common vulgar agencies by which men subsist in civilised society." "Those who knew him a little might call him a loose man in money matters; those who knew him closer, laughed at the idea of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like responsibility with his nature." As regards his OPINIONS. He professed himself a Tory in politics, and spoke with sternness, and even ferocity, concerning Whigs, Radicals, Republicans, Revolutionists, and "the faction of Jacobinism through its entire gamut." He objccted to the Reform Bill of 1832 that it had "ruffianised" Parliament-" introduced a Kentucky element" into an assembly conducted with more than Roman dignity. Theoretically, he held that both Whigs and Tories were necessary to the British Constitution, as guiding the two opposed forces of the nation, the one the democratic, the other the aristocratic; that, properly understood, they were as two hemispheres, the one incomplete without the other. In their views of current questions, one party must be right and the other wrong, at least so far; but as regarded their reasons for existing, it was absurd to ask which was right and which was wrong-both must exist. He belonged himself by birth to the aristocratic party, and probably in his philosophic way he considered it his duty to criticise Radicals from the aristocratic point of view, using strong language without any corresponding strength of feeling. As a literary critic, his catholicity of spirit and breadth of view. were unique among the men of his time. Rarely indeed, if ever, has a mind so calm, unprejudiced, and comprehensive, been applied to the work of criticism. In his own day he was usually numbered among the "Lakers," or partisans of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He was so only in the sense of treating these remarkable men with justice. He, better than Jeffrey himself, knew the shortcomings of Wordsworth, condemned his theory of poetic diction, and made fun of absurdities in The Excursion"; but he felt the shortcomings with calm discrimination, and was not misled by them into undervaluing the striking originality of Wordsworth's genius. He was one of the most devout of the admirers of Shakspeare, and, as we have seen, entered with passionate rapture into the majestic harmonies of Milton; but he had no part in the common bond of the Lakers-their wholesale contempt for Pope. He says, in one of his "uncollected" papers : : "In the literature of every nation, we are naturally disposed to place in the highest rank those who have produced some great and colossal work-a 'Paradise Lost,' a 'Hamlet,' a 'Novum Organum'-which presupposes an effort of intellect, a comprehensive grasp, and a sustaining power, for its original conception, corresponding in grandeur to that effort, different in kind, which must preside in its execution. But, after this highest class, in which the power to conceive and the power to execute are upon the same scale of grandeur, there comes a second, in which brilliant powers of execu tion, applied to conceptions of a very inferior range, are allowed to establish a classical rank. Every literature possesses, besides its great national gallery, a cabinet of minor pieces, not less perfect in their polish, possibly more so. In reality, the characteristic of this class is elaborate perfection-the point of inferiority is not in the finishing, but in the compass and power of the original creation, which (however exquisite in its class) moves within a smaller sphere. To this class belong, for example, The Rape of the Lock, that finished jewel of English literature; The Dunciad' (a still more ex quisite gem); 'The Vicar of Wakefield' (in its earlier part): in German, |