of seven cottages clustering together round a lonely highland tarn, is interesting as suggesting seclusion from the endless tumults and angry passions of human society; the declining light of the afternoon, from its association with the perils and dangers of the night. Thus it happens that often, instead of describing he really expounds—-expounds the thoughts that arise from the general features of a scene by force of association or of similitude. We see this in his description of the English Lake scenery :

"But more even than Anne Radcliffe had the landscape-painters, so many and so various, contributed to the glorification of the English Lake district; drawing out and impressing upon the heart the sanctity of repose in its shy recesses - - its Alpine grandeur in such passes as those of Wastdalehead, Langdalehead, Borrowdale, Kirkstone, Hawsdale, &c., together with the monastic peace which seems to brood over its peculiar form of pastoral life, so much nobler (as Wordsworth notices) in its stern simplicity and continual conflict with danger hidden in the vast draperies of mist overshadowing the hills, and amongst the armies of snow and hail arrayed by fierce northern winters, than the effeminate shepherd's life in the classical Arcadia, or in the flowery pastures of Sicily."

An indifferent observer of nature, De Quincey was minute and precise in his observation of human beings. Every face that he net he seems to have watched with the vigilant attention of a Boswell. He has described the persons of many of his contemporaries. His most careful portraits are, perhaps, his Lake companions-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Wilson. To these must be added his delineation of the notorious murderer Williams. The reader that desires to see how watchful an eye he had for the smallest particularities of shape, look, and bearing, will do well to read his prefatory note on Coleridge, vol. xi.

It is in the description of the feelings that he particularly excels. Not only is he deeply learned in the proper vocabulary of the feelings; he had acquired by close study, and employs with exquisite skill, a profound knowledge of the outward manifestations of feeling in tone, feature, gesture, and conduct. In reading motives from what he would have called the dumb hieroglyphics of observed or recorded behaviour, and in tracing the succession of feelings that must have passed under given circumstances, he is one of our greatest masters. In this point more perhaps than in any other, he challenges the closest attention of the student.

A good specimen of his power is the passage in the Marr murder where he pictures Mary's feelings on her returning to the door and finding it locked :

"Mary rang, and at the same time very gently knocked. She had no fear of disturbing her master or mistress; them she made sure of finding still up. Her anxiety was for the baby, who, being disturbed, might again

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rob her mistress of a night's rest; and she well knew that with three people all anxiously awaiting her return, and by this time, perhaps, seriously uneasy at her delay, the least audible whisper from herself would in a moment Yet how is this? To her astonishment-bring one of them to the door. but with the astonishment came creeping over her an icy horror-no stir nor murmur was heard ascending from the kitchen. At this moment came back upon her, with shuddering anguish, the indistinct image of the stranger in the loose dark coat whom she had seen stealing along under the shadowy lamplight, and too certainly watching her master's motions. Keenly she now reproached herself that under whatever stress of hurry she had not acquainted Mr Marr with the suspicious appearances. Poor girl! she did not then know that, if this communication could have availed to put Marr upon his guard, it had reached him from another quarter; so that her own omission, which had in reality arisen under her hurry to execute her master's commission, could not be charged with any bad consequences. But all such reflections this way or that were swallowed up at this point in overmastering One person might have panic. That her double summons could have been unnoticed-this solitary fact in one moment made a revelation of horror. fallen asleep, but two-but three-that was a mere impossibility. And even supposing all three together with the baby locked in sleep, still how unaccountable was this utter, utter silence! Most naturally at this moment something like hysterical horror overshadowed the poor girl; and now, at last, she rang the bell with the violence that belongs to sickening terror. This done, she paused. Self-command enough she still retained, though fast and fast it was slipping away from her, to bethink herself that, if any overwhelming accident had compelled both Marr and his apprentice-boy to leave the house in order to summon surgical aid from opposite quarters-a thing barely supposable-still, even in that case, Mrs Marr and her infant would be left, and some murmuring reply, under any extremity, would he elicited from the poor mother. To pause, therefore, to impose stern silence upon herself, so as to leave room for the possible answer to this final appeal, Still as death she was; became a duty of spasmodic effort. Listen, therefore, poor trembling heart; listen, and for twenty seconds be as still as death. and during that dreadful stillness, when she hushed her breath that she might listen, occurred an incident of killing fear, that to her dying day I would never cease to renew its echoes in her ear."

Narrative.

De Quincey never attempted any continuous history. Taking his own division of history into Narrative, Scenical, and Philosophical, we see that he had special qualifications for the two But he wanted industry to take up a national history What he might last modes. and pursue it continuously through all its stages. have done we can guess only from speculations recorded incidentally in such papers as his account of the Cæsars, or of Cicero, or Charlemagne, and from the spectacular sketch of the Revolt of the Tartars.

He wrote several short biographies. In these he has at least the negative merit of not chronicling unimportant facts. They can hardly be called narratives; there is in them as little as possible of anything that could be called narrative art. They are, properly speaking, discussions of perplexities that have

gathered about the story of the individual life, and descriptions. of the various features of the character.

In his most imaginative tales, such as the "Spanish Military Nun," the facts are altogether secondary to the poetical embellishments are but the bare cloth on which he works his manycoloured tapestry of pathos, humour, and soaring rhapsodies.

Exposition.

De Quincey possessed some of the best qualities of an expositor, coupled with considerable defects.

The great obstacle to his success in exposition was the want of simplicity. He was, as we have seen, too persistently scholastic for the ordinary reader, making an almost ostentatious use of logical forms and scientific technicalities.

As his studious clearness is marred by an unnecessary use of unfamiliar words and forms of expression, so others of his merits in exposition must be stated with some abatement.

"A man,"

Yet he

He was aware of the value of iterating a statement. he says, "who should content himself with a single condensed enunciation of a perplexed doctrine, would be a madman and a felo de se, as respected his reliance upon that doctrine." considered iteration a departure "from the severities of abstract discussion." "In the senate, and for the same reason in a newspaper, it is a virtue to reiterate your meaning: tautology becomes a merit; variation of the words, with a substantial identity of the sense and dilution of the truth, is oftentimes a necessity." But in a book, he held, repetition is rather a blemish, seeing that the reader may "return to the past page if anything in the present depends upon it." In this he was probably unpractical: doubtless the reader is saved much weariness by judicious repetition, although of course less is needed in a book than in a speech.

He knew also the value of stating the counter-proposition. In upholding the Ricardian law that the value of a thing is determined by the quantity of the labour that produces it, he broadly declares that the mere statement of the doctrine brings the student not one step nearer the truth, unless he is told what it is designed to contradict-namely, that the value of the thing is not determined by the value of the producing labour.

When he is thoroughly in earnest, and resolved to make an abstruse point clear to the meanest capacity, he knows how to proceed by means of simple examples and illustrations. The misfortune is, that he is not always alive to the abstruseness of the question he happens to be dealing with, and consequently wears to many readers an air of repulsive incomprehensibility.

His power of clothing a dry subject with interest appears advantageously in his "Templar's Dialogues on Political Economy." In respect of varied interest, this fragment is equal to the dialogues of Plato.

In consequence chiefly of his abstruseness, he cannot be recommended as a model to the popular expositor. Yet his command of language, his precision, and his power of imparting interest, make him a profitable study if the student knows what to imitate and what to avoid.

CHAPTER IL

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY,

1800-1859.

THIS most popular of modern prose writers was born on the 25th of October 1800, at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, the residence of his uncle-in-law and name-father, Thomas Babington.

His father, Zachary Macaulay, was a man of some note, and was judged worthy of a monument in Westminster Abbey. The son of a Scotch minister in Dumbartonshire, he made a moderate fortune in Jamaica and Sierra Leone, and on his return to England in 1799, became a principal supporter of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. A dry taciturn man, writing a plain terse style, he bore little outward resemblance to his distinguished son; but he had the same untiring powers of work, and the same extraordinary strength of memory. He edited the newspaper of the Abolitionists, and was the great master of the statistics employed for the agitation of the public mind. The historian's mother, a pupil of the sisters of Hannah More, was also a person of talent; to her he seems to have owed his buoyant constitution.

Never, to use his own favourite mode of expression, was a child brought into this world under circumstances more favourable to the development of literary talent. His parents belonged to a small sect of earnest and accomplished persons, closely knit together by a common object, and zealously devoted to their adopted mission. With the earliest dawn of intelligence he heard imperial policy discussed at his father's table, and the affairs of the nation arranged, not by ideal politicians, but by men actively engaged in public business-such men as Henry Thornton, Thomas Babington, and Wilberforce. He saw his father preparing their printed organ, and at an early age was taught by that encyclopedic statistician