(3.) So far from shirking—as is the manner of simple writers every call to modify a bare assertion, he revels in nice distinctions and scrupulous qualifications. This is a part of his

exactness.

(4.) We have already noticed his excessive use of abstract terms and forms of expression. What we exemplified as his favourite figure is not good for rapid perusal. When a transaction is represented as taking place, not between living agents, but between abstract qualities of those agents, a mode of statement so unfamiliar is not to be comprehended without a considerable effort of thought.

(5.) His general structure is not simple. Long periods, each embodying a flock of clauses, are abstruse reading. Even his explicitness of connection has not its full natural effect of making the effort of comprehension easy. He connects his statements with such exactness that the explicitness becomes a burden.

Certain things may be said in extenuation of this neglect of the ordinary means of simplicity.

I. With all his abstruseness he does observe certain points of a simple style.

(1.) He often repeats in simpler language what he has said with characteristic abstractness of phrase. Thus, in the case of his cardinal distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power—

"In that great social organ which, collectively, we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices that may blend, and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge; and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move. The first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a

sail."

(2.) In dealing with dates and statistics, he has a commendable habit of devising helps to the reader's memory by means of familiar comparisons. Thus

"This was in 1644, the year of Marston Moor, and the penultimate year of the Parliamentary war.'

Again

'Glasgow has as many thousands of inhabitants as there are days in the year. (I so state the population in order to as ist the reader's memory.)"

In like manner he helps us to remember the territorial extent and the population of Ceylon by a comparison with Ireland and Scotland.

(3.) A characteristic figure with him is a figure taken from simple movements :

"This growth of intellect, outrunning the capacities of the physical structure; "by night he succeeded in reaching the farther end of his duties; "he walked conscientiously through the services of the day." "Extraordinary erudition, even though travelling into obscure and sterile fields, has its own peculiar interest. And about Dr Parr, moreover, there circled another and far different interest."

It must, however, be admitted that such forms of expression, though intrinsically simple, are abstruse to the majority from not being familiar.

II. His technical terms can often justify their existence on the plea that they give greater precision. Thus

"There was a prodigious ferment in the first half of the seventeenth century. In the earlier bisection of the second half there was a general settling or deposition from this ferment.'

So in giving the dimensions of the famous Ceylon pillar

"The pillar measures six feet by six-i.e., thirty-six square feet—on the flat quadrangular tablet of its upper horizontal surface.

Once more, writing of the impossibility of translating certain words by any single word, he says—

"To take an image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap.'

In all these cases there is no denying that the expression is superlatively precise, although perhaps all the precision required under the circumstances might have been given in more familiar language.

Such are some of the circumstances that compensate his abstruseness. Imitators should see that they make equal compensation. The assertion may be hazarded that writers aiming at wide popularity are not safe to use so much abstruse language as De Quincey, whatever may be their powers of compensating.

Clearness.

Perspicuity. To readers that find no difficulty in the abstruseness of his diction, De Quincey is tolerably perspicuous. His virtues in this respect are summed up in the capital excellence of his paragraphs, explicitness of connection. If we find his diction easy, he is so scrupulous in keeping before us the general arrangement of his composition, as well as the bearing of particular statements, and even, as we have seen, of his numerous digressions, that we are seldom in danger of confusion.

Exactness, however, rather than perspicuity, is his peculiar merit.

On this he openly prides himself. In an article on Ceylon,

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.

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!"

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 door to the vindication of another. In fact, neither history nor biography 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 without end. These evils being perceived, equitable casuists began to revise the maxim, and in its new form it stood thus 'De mortuis nil nisi verum' (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 plead 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. Unless 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 deliverer 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 Epanin. ondas; 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