LEADERS IN LITERATURE

WITH A NOTICE OF

TRADITIONAL ERRORS AFFECTING THEM

BY

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

EDINBURGH

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

MDCCCLXII.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

HARVARD

COLLEGE

SEP 22 1916

LIBRARY

Gift of William Farnswortte

EDINBURGH: PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANT.

PREFATORY NOTICE.

THE difficulty of framing titles for books-such as shall adequately indicate their separate purposes and functions, whilst, at the same time, offering some colourable air of novelty, is sufficiently understood. But the full pressure of that difficulty, as it sometimes exists, and as, in fact, it exists in the case immediately before us, is but imperfectly appreciated. Where certain elements have been from the first intended to take their station, side by side, in the same volume, they will have been trained artificially beforehand into a fitness for co-membership in a whole. But the difficulty is prodigiously aggravated when the separate parts, that are suddenly and unexpectedly required to cohere into a systematic whole, arose originally upon casual and disconnected impulses, without any view to final convergement, or any reference whatever to a central principle. The difficulty, in extreme cases of this nature, ripens into an impossibility. Where there are absolutely no points of logical contact, it becomes a mere fantastic chase after a rainbow to pursue any comprehensive title such as can override the whole. In a case of that nature some indulgence may be reasonably challenged; and a dispensation