of Greece (and traced back to the days of Homer as the public nuisances of travellers)-usually put an end to the unoffending creature's life."

'It is asserted, as a general affection of human nature, that it is impos sible to read a book with satisfaction until one has ascertained whether the author of it be tall or short, corpulent or thin; and, as to complexion, whether he be a 'black' man (which, in the Spectator's' time, was the absurd expression for a swarthy man), or a fair man, or a sallow man, or perhaps a green man, which Southey affirmed to be the proper description of many stout artificers in Birmingham too much given to work in metallic fumes; ON WHICH ACCOUNT THE NAME OF SOUTHEY IS AN ABOMINATION TO THIS DAY IN CERTAIN FURNACES OF WARWICKSHIRE.

The excrescences on the last sentence might be justified on the ground that they are humorous, although in severe exposition the humour would probably be ill-timed; but the parenthetic information in the first is pedantic, and insufferably out of harmony with the rest of the sentence. Still even for this a casuist might find something to say, taking the parenthesis in relation to the subjectmatter and De Quincey's pitch of feeling in the treatment of it.

Paragraphs.

We have seen in our Introduction that De Quincey studied "the philosophy of transition and connection." He is scrupulously elaborate, almost too elaborate, in explaining the point of his statements.

No quotation can be made from De Quincey that does not exemplify this. Still the analysis of a short passage may help to put the student upon the proper track for seeing how large a part of his composition is taken up with phrases of connection :

"So it will always be. Those who (like Madame Dacier) possess no accomplishment but Greek, will of necessity set a superhuman value upon that literature in all its parts, to which their own narrow skill becomes an available key."

The expressions in italics are all connective. A rapid writer, such as Macaulay, would have omitted "like Madame Dacier," and in place of the connective periphrasis at the end, would have said briefly and pointedly "Greek literature," leaving the reader to pass on without the labour of formally comprehending the connection. To continue::

"Besides that, over and above this coarse and conscious motive for overrating that which reacts with an equal and answerable overrating upon their own little philological attainments, there is another agency at work, and quite unconsciously to the subjects of that agency, in listurbing the sanity of any estimate they may make of a foreign literature."

This sentence is wholly connective, joining together the two in

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ducements to overrate the value of a foreign literature second being stated as follows:

"It is the habit (well known to psychologists) of transferring to anything created by our own skill, or which reflects our own skill, as if it lay causatively and objectively in the reflecting thing itself, that pleasurable power which in very truth belongs subjectively to the mind of him who surveys it, from conscious success in the exercise of his own energies. Hence it is that we see daily without surprise young ladies hanging enamoured over the pages of an Italian author, and calling attention to trivial commonplaces, such as, clothed in plain mother English, would have been more repulsive to them than the distinctions of a theologian or the counsels of a great-grandmother. They mistake for a pleasure yielded by the author what is in fact the pleasure attending their own success in mastering what was lately an insuperable difficulty."

This explicitness of connection is the chief merit of De Quincey's paragraphs. He cannot be said to observe any other principle. He is carried into violations of all the other rules by his inveterate habit of digression. Often upon a mere casual suggestion he branches off into a digression of several pages, sometimes even digressing from the subject of his first digression. The enormity of these offences is a good deal palliated by his being conscious that he is digressing, and his taking care to let us know when he Some of strikes off from the main subject and when he returns. his papers are professedly "discursive," especially the Autobiographic Sketches.'

The following is an example of his way of apologising for a digression. It illustrates, at the same time, his capital excellence of explicit connection. In a paper professedly on Demosthenes, he comes across Lord Brougham's Rectorial Address at Glasgow, and at once, leaving Demosthenes, proceeds to discuss At the close of this several things mentioned in the address.

excursus he says:

:

"I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside from Demosthenes to another subject, not otherwise connected with the Attic orator than, first, by the common reference of both subjects to rhetoric; but, secondly, by the accident of having been jointly discussed by Lord Brougham in a paper which (though now forgotten) obtained at the moment most undue celebrity."

The apology, however, becomes the occasion of another offence. Before returning to Demosthenes, he throws in a few sentences of comment on the fact that in England the utterances of eminent public men on subjects beyond their province and their acquire ments are received with a deference not accorded to men "speaking under the known privilege of professional knowledge."

Should these digressions, obviously breaches of strict method, be imitated or avoided? The experienced writer will please himself, and consult the effect that he intends to produce. But if he

digresses after the model of De Quincey, he may rest assured that he will be accused of affectation, and will offend all that read for direct information concerning the subject in hand.

Figures of Speech.

De Quincey may be described as a very "tropical" writer (see INTRODUCTION p. 13). He uses comparatively few formal similitudes, but his pages are thickly strewn with "tropes," with metaphors, personifications, synecdoches, and metonymies.

His most characteristic and peculiar figure is personification. He makes a constant practice of applying predicates to names of inanimate things, and even to abstract nouns, as if they were names of living agents.

This mannerism pervades all De Quincey's writings, and is so characteristic that we at once think of him when we find it appearing strongly in another writer. A few examples give but a faint impression compared with what we receive when we read his volumes and meet with an example in every other sentence. It is peculiarly striking in the case of abstract nouns-above all, when one abstraction is represented as acting upon another; thus

"Here I had terminated this chapter as at a natural pause, which, while shutting out for ever my eldest brother from the reader's sight and from my own, necessarily at the same moment worked a permanent revolution in the character of my daily life. Two such changes, and both so abrupt, indicated imperiously the close of one era and the opening of another. The advantages, indeed, which my brother had over me in years, in physical activities of every kind, in decision of purpose, and in energy of will-all which advantages, besides, borrowed a ratification from an obscure sense, on my part, of duty as incident to what seemed an appointment of Providence -inevitably had controlled, and for years to come would have controlled, the free spontaneous movements of a dreamer like myself.”

This treatment of abstractions as living agents may be studied also in the following passage, concerning the civilising influence of Athens through her theatre:

"But if it were a vain and arrogant assumption to illuminate, as regarded those primal truths which, like the stars, are hung aloft, and shine for all alike, neither vain nor arrogant was it to fly her falcons at game almost as high. If not life, yet light; if not absolute birth, yet moral regeneration and fructifying warmth-these were quickening forces which abundantly she was able to engraft upon truths else slumbering and inert. Not affect ing to teach the new, she could yet vivify the old. Those moral echoes, so solemn and pathetic, that lingered in the ear from her stately tragedies, all spoke with the authority of voices from the grave. The great phantoms that crossed her stage, all pointed with shadowy fingers to shattered dynasties and the ruins of once regal houses, Pelopidæ or Labdacidæ, as monuments of sufferings in expiation of violated morals, or sometimes-which even more thrillingly spoke to human sensibilities-of guilt too awful to be

expiated. And in the midst of these appalling records, what is their ultimate solution? From what key-note does Athenian Tragedy trace the expansion of its own dark impassioned music? "TBpis (hybris)-the spirit of outrage coupled with the spirit of insult and arrogant self-assertion-in that temper lurks the original impulse towards wrong; and to that temper the Greek drama adapts its monitory legends. The doctrine of the Hebrew Scriptures as to vicarious retribution is at times discovered secretly moving through the scenic poetry of Athens. His own crime is seen hunting a man through five generations, and finding him finally in the persons of his Innocent descendants."

The tropical applying of abstractions to words expressing move ment-see in the above passage "lurking,' ," "moving,' hunting," &c.—is a prominent De Quinceyism. Ideas "lurk under" terms; distinctions "move obscurely" in the minds of men; revolutions "travel leisurely through their stages;" "the guardianship of civilisation suddenly unfolds itself like a banner over particular nations; a danger "approaches and wheels away-threatens, but finally forbears to strike," &c. &c.

The Sources of his Similitudes.-De Quincey's similitudes are drawn from an immense sphere of reading and observation. Without pretending to be exhaustive, we may mention separately some of his principal fields.

"rare as a

(1.) The characteristics of lower animals. He very often enlivens an adjective of quality by appending a comparison to some animal possessing the quality in an extreme form. We are constantly meeting such phrases as "restless as a hyena;' phoenix;" "by original constitution strong as one of Menx's drayhorses;" "Burke, a hunting leopard, coupled with Schlosser, a German poodle." In owning himself baffled to find any illustration of Richter's activity of understanding, he shows how deliberately he ransacked his knowledge in pursuit of similitudes :

"What then is it that I claim? Briefly, an activity of understanding so restless and indefatigable that all attempts to illustrate, or express it adequately, by images borrowed from the natural world, from the motions of beasts, birds, insects, &c., from the leaps of tigers or leopards, from the gambolling and tumbling of kittens, the antics of monkeys, or the running of antelopes and ostriches, &c., are baffled, confounded, and made ridiculous by the enormous and overmastering superiority of impression left by the thing illustrated."

(2.) Works of travel. A great reader of books of travel, he found in the customs and natural phenomena of foreign countries extreme examples, and thus was able to give to his similes a peculiar finish, and at times an independent value, such as attaches to some of the similes of Milton. Where for an image of hopeful change a less accomplished artist would simply make comparison to the opening of spring, De Quincey is able to cite the opening of spring in Sweden, and dwells upon a gorgeous picture of the sud

den vernal outburst in that country. An unfinished book that another would compare simply to an unfinished building, he compares to "a Spanish bridge or aqueduct begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect;" opening up remote collateral reflections to the reader that has time to pause and consider. Again, illustrating how soon we forget the features of dead or distant friends, he says—

"The faces of infants, though they are divine as flowers on a savanna of Texas, or as the carolling of birds in a forest, are, like flowers in a savanna of Texas, or the carolling of birds in a forest, soon overtaken by the pursuing darkness that swallows up all things human.”

Again—

"Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness.'

Once more

'the anarchy of dreams' presides in German philosophy; and the restless elements of opinion, throughout every region of debate, mould themselves eternally, like the billowy sands of the desert, as beheld by Bruce, into towering columns, soar upwards to a giddy altitude, then stalk about for a minute, all aglow with fiery colour, and finally unmould and 'dislimn,' with a collapse as sudden as the motions of that eddying breeze under which their vapoury architecture had arisen."

This last image was a favourite with him. He first used it in the article on Dr Parr :

"The brief associations of public carriages or inns are as evanescent as the sandy columns of the Great Desert, which the caprices of the wind build up and scatter, shape and unshape, within the brief revolution of a minute." He used it again in the preface to his 'Political Economy':

“... or, like the fantastic architecture which the winds are everlastingly pursuing in the Arabian desert, would exhibit phantom arrays of fleeting columns and fluctuating edifices, which, under the very breath that had created them, would be for ever collapsing into dust."

(3.) He very often compares individuals to celebrated personages in literature, by a kind of synecdoche. One specimen must suffice:

"Here at this time was living Mr Clarkson,-that son of thunder, that Titan, who was, in fact, the one great Atlas that bore up the Slave Trade Abolition cause-now resting from his mighty labours and nerve-shattering perils."

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(4) The feats of magic furnish him with several expressions of astonishment. Thaumaturgic" is a favourite word; he speaks of the "rhabdomantic" power of Christianity in evoking dormant