students of divinity. His vindication of Christianity as a peculiar religion, such that it cannot be regarded either simply as one of a series, or co-ordinate with other equally wide-spread religions, is a masterly performance. He calls attention to the fact that in no other religion but Christianity, and those which are connected with it, is morality recognised as religious. The national worship or cultus has been in all other instances wholly separated from questions of virtue and vice. In Christianity alone is our duty to our neighbour made part of our duty to God. In Judaism this is partially the case; in Mahommedanism less so; but still the influence of a true revelation is to be detected in the one as well as in the other. The originality and subtlety of De Quincey's mind are nowhere more conspicuous than in this essay; and it is worthy of observation that an intellect at once so powerful and so keen as his, and a boldness of inquiry which shrank from no length of investigation, should never have carried its possessor beyond the confines of revelation.

In his historical essays, if equally ingenious, he is perhaps, on the whole, less sound. It is in the region of pure speculation that he is most at home. Those who do not mix much in active life are naturally bad judges of those who do. Our best historians have not been pure students; and in proportion as they approximate to the latter character do they recede from the former. A propensity to extreme opinions and the use of sharply-cut distinctions, which impart a fallacious clearness to his views, are generally characteristic of the closet historian; and such in many respects was De Quincey. There is no doubt a danger upon the other side. Instead of too exclusive a search after principles, we may practically ignore their authority. In our worship of moderation we may lose all reverence for earnestness, enthusiasm, and self-denial. It would be easy to point out examples of either excess without going far back in the list of English historians. But to do so would lead us from our subject; and there is moreover no difficulty whatever in settling the position of De Quincey. Into pure history, however, he has not dipped very deeply. An essay on the Cæsars, another on Cicero, a third on Charlemagne, and a few remarks upon the Stuarts, are all his historical attempts which involve the discussion of opinion. Of historical narratives or sketches he has several, and all of them worthy of his pen. 'The Greek Revolution' and Greece under the Romans' are excellent historic pictures; but they are surpassed in eloquence and power by his Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars' and his Joan of Arc,' the former of which may take its place with the Traditions of the Rabbins' and passages of the OpiumEater,'

Eater,' among the very finest efforts of his genius. But in the few passages in which he has given us his estimate of great historical personages and events he is, for reasons already stated, less satisfactory. We are inclined, indeed, to go a long way with him in his judgment upon Julius Cæsar; but we utterly dissent from his unfavourable verdict upon Cicero. We are the more surprised at his opinion of this great man, because in his character of Pompey he shows that he had studied the history of Roman parties with considerable attention, and had penetrated to a truth which had escaped the eyes of Dr. Arnold. Pompey no doubt did represent an oligarchical clique which strove to make itself accepted as the legitimate heir of the republicans. Cæsar, on the other hand, would in destroying this clique have done no disservice to the commonwealth. Supposing the contest then to have lain between the democratic despotism of Julius and the spurious aristocracy of his rivals, we believe there was little to choose. So far we travel cheerfully in Mr. De Quincey's company. But there we stop. Had he read Cicero's letters with the attention they deserve, he would have seen, we think, that the statesman had by no means unlimited confidence in the Pompeian party. But there seems reason to believe that he hoped through their agency to keep alive at least the old forms of the Republic, till perhaps at some happier period they might regain their pristine energy. If, on the other hand, they were at once actually suspended, he was prescient enough to see that their sleep would be eternal. That these were the considerations which finally drove Cicero to throw in his lot with a party whom he never trusted, is we think evident from his correspondence. But Mr. De Quincey, not proof against that fascination which power seems to exercise over a certain class of literary minds, is subdued by the spell of Cæsar. What Frederick is to Mr. Carlyle, and our own Henry to Mr. Froude, that is the victor of Pharsalia to Thomas De Quincey. The essay on Charlemagne is to be commended for some excellent remarks on the different modes of writing history, and has also a most interesting but somewhat unfair comparison between Charlemagne and the first Napoleon.

Mixed essays, partly historical, partly philosophical, partly critical, are those on Judas Iscariot, the Essenes, and Secret Societies. Our readers are probably well aware of the leading ideas which they contain. The falling headlong' of Judas is explained as meaning moral ruin, and the gushing out of his bowels as a broken heart. The Essenes are conjectured to have been disguised Christians, an hypothesis supported with even more than the author's usual ingenuity. And all secret societies are said to be impositions actually, though inspired by a deep-seated and venerable human instinct;

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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 wiɛ 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

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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

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 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