instinct; that, namely, for glorifying the everlasting, for petrifying the fugitive, for arresting the transitory. With this brief notice of what our author has accomplished in the historical and quasihistorical department of letters, we pass on to the larger section of his serious works, namely, his critical and purely literary essays. The authors about whom he has written most are Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Of the first, third, and fourth, he was a devoted admirer and champion. But the second seemed to him the very incarnation of the worst epoch of our literature. And here we are at once brought face to face with one of his most salient characteristics as a critic-dislike of the eighteenth century literature. We know not whether it is by accident or design that the two central figures of its two principal epochs, namely, Pope and Dr. Johnson, are both objects of his displeasure. In the brilliancy of the poet, and the wit and moral worth of the Doctor, he was unable to find any flaw. But he often leads us to suspect that he would have been very glad to catch them without the shelter of these virtues. The century, in fact, represents a particular intellectual phase which is totally foreign to De Quincey. It is neither imaginative on the one hand, nor scientific on the other. It had neither the poetry and fervour of the seventeenth century, nor the deeper philosophy of the nineteenth. The Shakespearian beauty, the Miltonic earnestness, were dead; the regenerating influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge had not yet arisen. It was an age of a practical and business-like spirit. It had great reverence for scarfs, garters, and gold.' It was, to a certain extent, sceptical. It had little enthusiasm, but a great deal of steady energy. It made constant appeals to reason, common sense, and evidence; few or none to passion or to faith. And while it suffered theology to languish, it consolidated the British Constitution, and completed the fabric of the British empire. Hæ tibi erunt artes. And there is something about the unrefined vigour of that coarse-grained epoch which wins our own respect, like the perseverance of a strong man conquering all obstacles to fortune. But the sympathy which De Quincey was by nature qualified to feel with these characteristics of the period was arrested on the threshold by others less congenial to his mind. He liked not Pope stooping to the truth,' nor Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley with a kick and a stone. Perhaps also he lived too near to the eighteenth century to appreciate its peculiar merits. But appreciate it he did not, and one of the chief victims selected as the anvil of his wrath is the Poet of the Augustan Age. Besides the authors above mentioned, to whom two or three papers apiece have been devoted, including the admirable

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memoir of Pope in the Encyclopædia Britannica,' De Quincey has left us an article on Shakespeare, published in the same periodical; a short paper upon Goldsmith; a long one upon Dr. Parr; with critiques, more or less copious, upon all his contemporaries who in any way belonged to the later school. Of Crabbe, Byron, Moore, Scott, Rogers, and Campbell we have no mention. Of classical authors he has treated Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, and Homer; and under the same head may of course be classed his 'Theory of Greek Tragedy.' Of these, the last, and the papers on Herodotus and Homer, are especially worthy of attention. Scouting altogether the view which classes the Father of History as a mere fabling annalist, or even a great scenical historian,' he claims for him Encyclopædic honours, as annalist, geographer, chronologer, and philosophergeneral of the world before Marathon. And he points out how thoroughly modern discoveries are testifying to the veracity of his reports, and the justice of his observations, which it has so long been the fashion to discredit. In Homer and the Homerida he gives us a most acute and convincing argument in favour of the unity of the Homeric poems. Of foreign literature De Quincey has written upon Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kant, Richter, Herder, and Schlosser. Of the first he has only reviewed the 'Wilhelm Meister,' but in severely sarcastic terms; of Lessing he has given us a translation of the 'Laocoon,' with notes and preface, containing an ingenious comparison between Dr. Johnson, Lessing, and the second Lord Shaftesbury. The article on Richter consists likewise of a preface and translations; those on Kant and Herder are rather biographical than critical. And Schlosser's Literary History of the Eighteenth Century is reviewed at some length, and with much contemptuous censure. He has also written three essays of a more abstract literary character, namely, on Language, on Style, and on Rhetoric.

Of the other serious writings of De Quincey which fall outside of the above classification, the best known is unquestionably the 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.' But it does not come within our present purpose to say very much of this extraordinary piece of composition; all that it contains of biographical interest we have embodied in the earlier part of this article; of the remainder we cannot say anything that has not been said already. De Quincey's imagination was powerful enough by itself; but stimulated by this intoxicating drug, it soared to astonishing heights of sublimity. Nor was his command of language inadequate to the expression of his thoughts. One passage is remarkable for the eloquence of mysterious awe:— 'Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character-a tumultuous

tumultuous dream-commencing with a music such as now I often heard in sleep-music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation Anthem; and, like that, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where somehow, but I knew not how-by some beings, but I knew not by whom-a battle, a strife, an agony, was travelling through all its stages was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams, where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt." Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment allowed--and clasped hands, with heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells; and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated-everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!'-Works, v. 272.

We might, perhaps, find something equal to this in the Sermons of Edward Irving. But of all the authors with whom we are acquainted, we know of none other from whose works we should have any chance of rivalling the splendid sadness of the above. We e quote this specimen of The Confessions' merely to remind our readers of the treasures which they neglect in keeping De Quincey on their shelves. Scattered through these fourteen volumes are other passages scarcely, if at all, inferior to the above; while with beauties only just inferior to them every essay which he penned is rife. Of the other essays which come under this division of our subject, we should especially recommend 'Casuistry,' 'Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected,' and the Traditions of the Rabbins.' The first is valuable as an attempt to rescue from popular obloquy a really important science. As the science which treats of the applica

tion of general principles in the presence of conflicting obligations, it is quite clear that casuistry must have its wholesome as well as its pernicious uses. But it is the extreme difficulty of working it without mischief to ordinary minds, that has probably effected its disgrace, and that operates as a bar to its revival. The 'Letters to a Young Man' constitute an able treatise on the philosophy of education, and are remarkable for containing that fine distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power which he first drew out in one of his articles on Pope. For the sake of such among our readers as may not recollect exactly what it is that we are alluding to, we may explain that by the literature of knowledge is meant books which communicate facts, and survive only while those facts are living, or while the mode of communication is not superseded by another; and that by the literature of power is meant books which live by their own inherent merit. Newton's 'Principia' is taken as a type of the one class, Homer's Iliad' of the other; the deduction being that it is only this latter which has any real value in the highest branch of education. The reader may compare with this a somewhat analogous passage in Johnson's 'Life of Milton,' where he verges closely upon enunciating the same principle, and does arrive at the same conclusion, though by a process less subtly critical.

In conclusion, we have to notice his essays on Political Economy. These are contained in a paper denominated ‘Dialogues of Three Templars,' which forms part of the present Selections; and also in a separate volume, entitled the 'Logic of Political Economy.' These essays are commentaries illustrative, confirmatory, and supplementary, of Mr. Ricardo; and we believe we may say that they are universally acknowledged by scientific economists to display a thorough mastery of the subject.

It is in some of these last-mentioned essays that De Quincey especially displays one leading characteristic of his mind, namely, a passion for penetrating to the realities of things. This, as we shall have occasion to show presently, was at the bottom of his political creed. We will here give some specimens of it in relation to literature. The first is a comparison between the Greek and Hebrew languages:

'It cannot be necessary to say that from that memorable centre of intellectual activity have emanated the great models in art and literature, which, to Christendom, when recasting her mediæval forms, became chiefly operative in controlling her luxuriance, and in other negative services, though not so powerful for positive impulse and inspiration. Greece was, in fact, too ebullient with intellectual activity -an activity too palestric, and purely human-so that the opposite

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pole of the mind, which points to the mysterious and the spiritual, was, in the agile Greek, too intensely a child of the earth, starved and palsied; whilst in the Hebrew, dull and inert intellectually, but in his spiritual organs awake and sublime, the case was precisely reversed. Yet, after all, the result was immeasurably in favour of the Hebrew. Speaking in the deep sincerities of the solitary and musing heart, which refuses to be duped by the whistling of names, we must say of the Greek that-laudatur et alget he has won the admiration of the human race, he is numbered amongst the chief brilliancies of earth, but on the deeper and more abiding nature of man he has no hold. He will perish when any deluge of calamity overtakes the libraries of our planet, or if any great revolution of thought remoulds them, and will be remembered only as a generation of flowers is remembered; with the same tenderness of feeling, and with the same pathetic sense of a natural predestination to evanescence. Whereas the Hebrew, by introducing himself to the secret places of the human heart, and sitting there as incubator over the awful germs of the spiritualities that connect man with the unseen worlds, has perpetuated himself as a power in the human system: he is co-enduring with man's race, and careless of all revolutions in literature or in the composition of society. The very languages of these two races repeat the same expression of their intellectual differences, and of the differences in their missions. The Hebrew, meagre and sterile as regards the numerical wealth of its ideas, is infinite as regards their power; the Greek, on the other hand, rich as tropic forests, in the polymorphous life, the life of the dividing and distinguishing intellect, is weak only in the supreme region of thought.'-ix. 80.

The second is from the Letters to a Young Man,' and expresses, in our opinion, a literary truth as novel as it is important:

"The Roman mind was great in the presence of man, mean in the presence of nature; impotent to comprehend or to delineate the internal strife of passion, but powerful beyond any other national mind to display the energy of the will victorious over all passion. Hence it is that the true Roman sublime exists nowhere in such purity as in those works which were not composed with a reference to Grecian models. On this account I wholly dissent from the shallow classification which expresses the relations of merit between the writers of the Augustan period and that which followed, under the type of a golden and silver age. As artists, and with reference to composition, no doubt many of the writers of the latter age were rightly so classed; but an inferiority quoad hoc argues no uniform and absolute inferiority; and the fact is, that, in weight and grandeur of thought, the silver writers were much superior to the golden. Indeed, this might have been looked for on à priori grounds; for the silver writers were more truly Roman writers from two causes: first, because they trusted more to their own native style of thinking, and, looking less anxiously to Grecian archetypes, they wrote more naturally, feelingly, and originally; secondly, because the political circumstances