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Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

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INTRODUCTION.

[DE QUINCEY'S interest in the eighteenth century literature was rather antipathetic than sympathetic, but he expended upon the subject much time and space. The present volume does not include all of the essays which might properly be included under the title chosen, but in the classification of his papers, some which might have fallen into this class are drawn by stronger affiliations into other groups. Where a writer is so discursive and so catholic in his interests as was De Quincey, any arrangement of his writings is likely to be a little arbitrary, or rather, several arrangements are possible, and good reason might be given for either. The present collection, however, has a certain unity of purpose, especially in that it contains De Quincey's several papers on Pope, a subject which called out his keenest criticism and notably that valuable distinction between the literature of power and the literature of knowledge, which, simple as it appears, was a real contribution by the writer to the philosophy of literature. In the latest English edition, revised by De Quincey, there are some introductory notes respecting certain of the articles in this volume, which herewith follow. It should be premised that as the papers are collected from different volumes in the American edi

tion, so they are scattered also, under a different classification, in the English.]

DR. PARR AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

In the paper on Dr. Parr, a careless reader may fancy that I, being a Tory, am illiberal enough to assume that Whiggism is in itself a matter of reproach. But in this he would be doing me great injustice; for it happens that I have placed on record my own peculiar views of the relation subsisting between the doctrine of the Tories and that of the Whigs; which views represent them as separately forming the two hemispheres which jointly compose the total truth. In a paper on that subject I contend that, when Charles Fox undertook a history of our English Revolution, with the purpose of glorifying the Whigs in contradistinction to the Tories, as the heroes of that great event, he made shipwreck of all political philosophy. The misconception was total. A Trinitarian, I there said by way of illustration, and an anti-Trinitarian cannot both be right: in such a case the affirmation of either is the negation of the other. But in very many cases this is far otherwise. The Whig and the Tory, for instance, are both right: and both equally right. Not only so, but the one is right only because (and so long as) the other is right. Singly, the Tory would be wrong. Singly, the Whig would be wrong. But taken jointly they compose that synthesis which realizes and embodies the total constitutional truth. The Whig takes charge of the constitutional forces in one direction; the Tory in another. And it would be as absurd to invest either party with a superior function, as to imagine the centripetal force more important

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