having said that a young officer, marching with a small body of men through the island, took Kandy in his route, he appends a footnote to the word "took" :

"This phrase is equivocal; it bears two senses-the traveller's sense and the soldier's. But we rarely make such errors in the use of words; the error is original in the government documents themselves."

He certainly had reason to glory. None of our writers in general literature have shown themselves so scrupulously precise. His works are still the crowning delicacy for lovers of formal, punctilious exactness.1

Of this exactness we have already given several illustrations. We have illustrated the exactness of his comparisons, and the fact that he often purchases exactness at the price of simplicity. Reference may also be made to the account of his opinions and the passage there quoted.

His minuteness in modifying vague general expressions is particularly worthy of notice, and, when not pushed to a pedantic extreme, worthy of imitation. He seldom says that a thing is remarkable without adding in what respects. A man's life is "notable in two points; has "two separate claims upon our

notice: "

"A man of original genius, shown to us as revolving through the leisurely stages of a biographical memoir, lays open, to readers prepared for such revelations, two separate theatres of interest; one in his personal career, the other in his works and his intellectual development."

In like manner, "that sanctity which settles on the memory of a great man, ought, upon a double motive, to be vigilantly sustained by his countrymen." When he predicates a superlative, he is exemplarily scrupulous to let us know what particulars it applies to. Aristotle's Rhetoric is "the best, as regards the primary purpose of the teacher; though otherwise, for elegance," &c. Jeremy Taylor and Sir T. Browne are "undoubtedly the richest, the most dazzling, and, with reference to their matter, the most captivating of all rhetoricians." When he puts the question, "Was Cæsar, upon the whole, the greatest of men?" he does not at once pronounce roundly "Yes" or "No." He first explains in what sense he means great:

"Was Cæsar, upon the whole, the greatest of men? We restrict the question, of course, to the classes of men great in action; great by the extent

1 With a legitimate feeling of his own innocence, he often censures the lax practice of other writers. He is angry with Dr Johnson for not further explaining what he meant by calling Pope "the most correct of poets "Correctness," he exclaims, "in what? Think of the admirable qualifications for settling the scale of such critical distinctions which that man must have had who turned out upon this vast world the single oracular word correctness' to shift for itself, and explain its own meaning to all generations!"

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of their influence over their social contemporaries; great by throwing open avenues to extended powers that previously had been closed; great by mak ing obstacles once vast to become trivial; or prizes that once were trivial to be glorified by expansion."

As an example of this "pettifogulising" on the larger scale, we may quote his footnote on the maxim "De mortuis nil nisi bonum"

"This famous canon of charity (Concerning the dead, let us have nothing but what is kind and favourable) has furnished an inevitable occasion for much doubtful casuistry. The dead, as those pre-eminently unable to defend themselves, enjoy a natural privilege of indulgence amongst the generous and considerate; but not to the extent which this sweeping maxim would proclaim, since, on this principle, in cases innumerable, tenderness to the dead would become the ground of cruel injustice to the living: nay, the maxim would continually counterwork itself; for too inexorable a forbearance with regard to one dead person would oftentimes effectually close the In fact, neither history nor biography door to the vindication of another. is able to move a step without infractions of this rule; a rule emanating from the blind kindliness of grandmothers, who, whilst groping in the dark after one individual darling, forget the collateral or oblique results to others 'De mortuis nil nisi verum without end. These evils being perceived, equitable casuists began to revise the maxim, and in its new form it stood thus (Concerning the dead, let us have nothing but what is true'). Why, certainly, that is an undeniable right of the dead; and nobody in his senses would Unplead for a small percentage of falsehood. Yet, again, in that shape the maxim carries with it a disagreeable air of limiting the right to truth. less it is meant to reserve a small allowance of fiction for the separate use of the living, why insist upon truth as peculiarly consecrated to the dead? If all people, living and dead alike, have a right to the benefits of truth, why specify one class, as if in silent contradistinction to some other class, less eminently privileged in that respect? To me it seems evident that the human mind has been long groping darkly after some separate right of the dead in this respect, but which hitherto it has not been able to bring into reconciliation with the known rights of the living. Some distinct privilege there should be, if only it could be sharply defined and limited, through which a special prerogative might be recognised as among the sanctities of the grave."

Strength.

De Quincey's style, as the reader has doubtless remarked in preceding extracts, is not animated-meaning by animation the presentation of ideas in rapid succession-it stands, in fact, to use a phrase of his own, in "polar antithesis" to the animated style. His prevailing characteristic is elaborate stateliness. He finds the happiest exercise of his powers in sustained flights through the region of the sublime.

I. Let us first exemplify his elevation of style as applied to the ordinary subjects of lofty composition, such as men of extraordinary powers, secret machinations, great natural phenomena, scenes of horror and confusion.

He had not, like Carlyle, a formal gallery of historical heroes. He seldom lends his powers of style to glorifying the great men of history. His tendency was rather to discover and develop lurking objects of admiration or astonishment—the daring of Zebek Dorchi against the "mighty behemoth of Muscovy," the energetic hardihood of the slave that attempted to assassinate the Emperor Commodus, the erection of a statue to the slave Æsop, and suchlike. The following is his account of "Walking Stewart," whom almost anybody else would have passed by as a harebrained enthusiast :

"His mind was a mirror of the sentient universe-the whole mighty vision that had fleeted before his eyes in this world-the armies of Hyder Ali and his son Tippoo, with oriental and barbaric pageantry; the civic grandeur of England; the great deserts of Asia and America; the vast capitals of Europe-London, with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its 'mighty heart'; Paris, shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions; the silence of Lapland; and the solitary forests of Canada; with the swarming life of the torrid zone; together with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow that he had participated in by sympathy,―lay like a map beneath him, as if eternally co-present to his view; so that, in the contemplation of the prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the parts or occupy his mind with details."

The machinations of secret societies had a great charm for him. Here is a passage concerning the Hetaria of Greece:

"It cannot be denied that a secret society, with the grand and almost awful purposes of the Hetaria, spite of some taint which it had received in its early stages from the spirit of German mummery, is fitted to fill the imagination, and to command homage from the coldest. Whispers circulating from mouth to mouth of some vast conspiracy mining subterraneously beneath the very feet of their accursed oppressors-whispers of a great de liverer at hand whose mysterious Labarum, or mighty banner of the Cross, was already dimly descried through northern mists, and whose eagles were already scenting the carnage and savour of death' from innumerable hosts of Moslems-whispers of a revolution which was again to call, as with the trumpet of resurrection, from the grave, the land of Timoleon and Epaminondas; such were the preludings, low and deep, to the tempestuous overture of revolt and patriotic battle which now ran through every nook of Greece, and caused every ear to tingle."

The following is an example of his description of sublime natural phenomena. It occurs as a similitude :—

"Has the reader witnessed, or has he heard described, the sudden burst -the explosion, one might say-by which a Swedish winter passes into spring, and spring simultaneously into summer? The icy sceptre of winter does not there thaw and melt away by just gradations: it is broken, it is shattered, in a day, in an hour, and with a violence brought home to every sense. No second type of resurrection, so mighty or so affecting, is manifested by nature in southern climates. Such is the headlong tumult, such the torrent rapture' by which life is let loose amongst the air, the earth, and the waters under the earth. Exactly what this vernal resurrection is in

E

manifestations of power and life, by comparison with climates that have no winter; such, and marked with features as distinct, was," &c.

As an example of his power of depicting horrors, take his account of the sack of Enniscorthy

"Next came a scene which swallowed up all distinct or separate features in its frantic confluence of horrors. All the loyalists of Enniscorthy, all the gentry for miles around who had congregated in that town as a centre of security, were summoned at that moment, not to an orderly retreat, but to instant flight. At one end of the street were seen the rebel pikes, and bayonets, and fierce faces, already gleaming through the smoke; at the other end volumes of fire, surging and billowing from the thatched roofs, and blazing rafters beginning to block up the avenues of escape. Then began the agony and uttermost conflict of what is worst and what is best in human nature. Then was to be seen the very delirium of fear, and the very delirium of vindictive malice-private and ignoble hatred, of ancient origin, shrouding itself in the mask of patriotic wrath; the tiger-glare of just vengeance, fresh from intolerable wrongs and the never-to-be-forgotten ignominy of stripes and personal degradation; panic, self-palsied by its own excess; flight, eager or stealthy, according to the temper and the means; volleying pursuit; the very frenzy of agitation, under every mode of excitement; and here and there the desperation of maternal love victorious and supreme above all lower passions. I recapitulate and gather under general abstractions many an individual anecdote reported by those who were on that day present in Enniscorthy; for at Ferns, not far off, and deeply interested in all those transactions, I had private friends, intimate participators in the trials of that fierce hurricane, and joint sufferers with those who suffered most."

It is this "recapitulation and gathering under general abstractions" that raises the passage above those hideous accumulations of horrible particulars faithfully reported by newspaper correspondents from seats of war. His "Revolt of the Tartars" is a good example of sustained grandeur of narrative and description; there also he abstains from individual horrors, and raises the imagination to dwell with awe upon the passions raging through the strife.

II. Let us now constitute a special section for his peculiar flights of sublimity, not because they are essentially different from the preceding, but because they really have, what they claim to have, a slight element of peculiarity; because, in short, they are experimental.

It is sometimes said that De Quincey claims to be the originator of impassioned prose. He makes no such claim. He knew as well as anybody that impassioned prose had been written long before his day, by Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Burke, and others.1 What he did claim was to be the author of a "mode of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that he was aware of in any literature." He speaks of the utter sterility

1 Two, at least, of his impassioned apostrophes are modelled upon Sir Walter Raleigh's famous apostrophe to Death.

of universal literature, not in impassioned prose, but in "one de partment of impassioned prose.' That department may be described with sufficient precision as "impassioned autobiography."

Why call this a special department, and speak of it as a hazardous experiment? The specialty consists in describing incidents of purely personal interest in language suited to their magnitude as they appear in the eyes of the writer; and the danger is, as we have had occasion to notice incidentally (p. 59), that readers be unsympathetic, and refuse to interest themselves in the writer's personal feelings. The specialty is undoubtedly considerable, and so is the danger. That De Quincey succeeded was shown by the popularity of his autobiographical works.

The mere splendour of such a style as De Quincey's would, to readers prepared to enjoy it, overcome a great amount of distastefulness in the subject. But apart from the mechanical execution, he showed himself sensible of the chief danger in the treatment of such themes. That danger is, the intrusion of personal vanity. "Any expression of personal vanity, intruding upon impassioned records, is fatal to their effect, as being incompatible with that absorption of spirit and that self-oblivion in which only deep passion originates, or can find a genial home." If the autobiographer steps aside from the record of his feelings to compare them with the feelings of other people, and to make out that he has been honoured, afflicted, or agitated above other people, every reader's self-conceit takes the alarm, and forthwith scans the writer with cynical antipathy. De Quincey is on his guard against making such a blunder. He does not, as Mr Tennyson sometimes does, exhibit his sufferings in comparison with the sufferings of other men, and claim for the incidents of his life an affinity with the most tragical events incident to frail humanity. He represses every suggestion that he regards the events of his life as other than commonplace in the eye of an impartial observer. He is intent upon expounding them simply as they affected him; conscious all the time that to other men the events of their life are of equal magnitude, and that he must not egotistically challenge comparison; knowing, as an artist, that any expression of personal vanity, any appearance of pluming himself upon his experience, is fatal to the effect of the composition.

We need not fill up our limited space with quotations from a book so well known as the Opium Confessions, and now published at sixpence. One only will be given, and that as having already been alluded to. The reader will notice that our author is wholly engrossed with his suffering and his sudden resolution, and endeavours only to make his case vividly intelligible; there is no trace of boastful comparison with the experience of other people :