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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. 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

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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 haz ardous 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 aların, 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 :

In the

"But now, at last, came over me, from the mere excess of bodily suffering and mental disappointments, a frantic and rapturous reagency United States the case is well known, and many times has been described by travellers, of that furious instinct which, under a secret call for saline variations of diet, drives all the tribes of buffaloes for thousands of miles to the common centre of the 'Salt-licks.' Under such a compulsion does the locust, under such a compulsion does the leeming, traverse its mysterious path. They are deaf to danger, deaf to the cry of battle, deaf to the trumpets of death. Let the sea cross their path. let armies with artillery bar the road, even these terrific powers can arrest only by destroying; and the most frightful abysses, up to the very last menace of engulfment, up to the very instant of absorption, have no power to alter or retard the line of their inexorable advance.

"Such an instinct it was, such a rapturous command-even so potent, and, alas! even so blind-that, under the whirl of tumultuous indignation and of new-born hope, suddenly transfigured my whole being. In the twinkling of an eye, I came to an adamantine resolution-not as if issuing from any act or any choice of my own, but as if positively received from some dark oracular legislation external to myself.

Pathos.

From the prevailing majesty of his diction, De Quincey's pathos is rarely of a homely order. In some of his papers, as in the "Military Nun," there are touching little strokes of half-humorous tenderness. But his most characteristic pathos is impassioned regret for departed nobleness; in which case he blends with his expressions of sorrow a splendid glorification of the object, so that the mind is at once saddened and filled with ideas of sublimity.

The impassioned apostrophes of the Opium Confessions are tolerably well known. We may therefore choose an example from a composition less generally known-his paper on "Joan of Arc":

"What is to be thought of her? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that-like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judea -rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more peril. ous station at the right hand of kings? Pure, innocent, noblehearted girl! whom, from earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was amongst the strongest pledges for thy truth, that never once-no, not for a moment of weakness-didst thou revel in the vision of coronets and honour from man. Coronets for thee! Oh no! Honours, if they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood. Daughter of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, king of France, but she will not hear thee! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be found en contumace. When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to die, that was thy portion in this life; that was thy destiny; and not for a moment was it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is short; and the sleep which is in the grave is

long. Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long. This pure creature -pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious-never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw not in vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spectators without end on every road pouring into Rouen as to a coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, the hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that lurked but here and there, until nature and imperishable truth broke loose from artificial restraints,-these might not be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But the voice that called her to death, that she heard for ever.

As an example of a pathetic apostrophe, in a less touching but still impressive key, take his reminiscence of Edward Irving, from one of his unreprinted papers :—

"He was the only man of our times who realised one's idea of Paul preaching at Athens, or defending himself before King Agrippa. Terrific meteor! unhappy son of fervid genius, which mastered thyself even more than the rapt audiences which at one time hung upon thy lips! were the cup of life once again presented to thy lips, wouldst thou drink again? or wouldst thou not rather turn away from it with shuddering abomination? Sleep, Boanerges, and let the memory of man settle only upon thy colossal powers, without a thought of those intellectual aberrations which were more powerful for thy own ruin than for the misleading of others!"

Humour.

Our author's "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts," belongs to a vein of irony peculiarly his own--the humour of bringing the ideas of Fine Art and ordinary business into ludicrous collision with solemn or horrible transactions. An extract or two from the beginning of this paper will give an idea of its character. It is preceded by an " Advertisement of a man morbidly virtuous," which begins thus

"Most of us who read books, have probably heard of a society for the promotion of vice, of the Hell-Fire Club, founded in the last century by Sir Francis Dashwood, &c. At Brighton, I think it was, that a society was formed for the suppression of virtue. That society was itself suppressed; but I am sorry to say that another exists in London, of a character still more atrocious. In tendency, it may be denominated a society for the encourage ment of murder; but, according to their own delicate evpnuouòs, it is styled. The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder. They profess to be curious in homat cide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of carnage; and, i murder-fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class which the po' of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a pi or other work of art. But I need not trouble myself with describe the spirit of their proceedings, as the reader will ently rich and better from one of the monthly lectures read before their greatest masThis has fallen into my hands accidentally, in spite position. If one exercised to keep their transactions from the public eyeMilton's melody is

The "morbidly virtuous" advertiser concludes by saying that he has not yet heard of the society offering prizes for a wellexecuted murder, but that "undoubtedly their proceedings tend to that." The atrocious lecture thus exposed to the eye of the public begins as follows:

"GENTLEMEN,-I have had the honour to be appointed by your committee to the trying task of reading the Williams' Lecture on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts, a task which might be easy enough three or four centuries ago, when the art was little understood, and few great models had been exhibited; but in this age, when masterpieces of excellence have been executed by professional men, it must be evident, that in the style of criticism applied to them, the public will look for something of a corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must advance pari passu. People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed-a knife-a purse-and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us; and to me. therefore, in particular, has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like Eschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr Wordsworth observes, has in a manner created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.' To sketch the history of the art and to examine his principles critically, now remains as a duty for the connoisseur, and for judges of quite another stamp from his Majesty's Judges of Assize.' The humour is kept up through fifty-seven pages.1

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The "Williams' Lecture" is the crowning achievement of his humour. His works contain many occasional touches, in the same vein. He is frequently jocular on the subject of death. Thus

"In like manner, I do by no means deny that some truths have been delivered to the world in regard to opium: thus, it has been repeatedly affirmed by the learned that opium is a tawny brown in colour-and this, take notice, I grant; secondly, that it is rather dear, which also I grant-for in my time East India opium has been three guineas a-pound, and Turkey eight and, thirdly, that if you eat a good deal of it, most probably you must do what is disagreeable to any man of regular habits—viz., die.' Again, alluding to Savage Landor's contumacy at school:

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666 'Roberte the Deville' see the old metrical romance of that name: it belongs to the fourteenth century, and was printed some thirty years ago, with wood engravings of the illuminations. Roberte, however, took the liberty of murdering his schoolmaster. But could he well do less? Being a reigning Duke's son, and after the rebellious schoolmaster had said'Sir, ye bee too bolde:

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And therewith took a rodde hymn for to chaste.'

thee! Cite the meek Robin, without using any bad language as the schoolshe will be foune, simply took out a long dagger hym for to chaste,' which as even yet may lv. The schoolmaster gave no bad language after that." girl that gave up a

been deaf for five ce in vol. iv. of the Collected Edition. This volume, contain. this life; that was trof the Tartars," the "Templar's Dialogues," and the "Vision thyself. Life, thou sards good examples of all the qualities of his style.

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