which thirsts for leaving wounds, nor, on the other hand, the deep moral indignation which burns in men whom Providence has from time to time armed with scourges for cleansing the sanctuaries of truth or justice. He was contented enough with society as he found it: bad it might be; but it was good enough for him; and it was the merest self delusion if at any moment the instinct of glorying in his satiric mission (the magnificabo apostolatum meum) persuaded him that in his case it might be said-Facit indignatio versum.'

Now we did not require to be told that the satire of Pope was not the satire of Juvenal. But, after all, what more does this passage really amount to? Had Mr. De Quincey been prepared with an entirely new definition of satire, which should exclude all writings that were not prompted either by deep malice or deep moral indignation, he would have occupied a fair position. But it is rather too bad to judge Pope by a canon which he knew perfectly well would be fatal to a great number of other writers, without so much as glancing at its legitimate consequences. He has let loose upon us a dictum which drums out of the regiment of satirists some of the best soldiers in its ranks, without so much as a single word to show that he knew what he was doing. For, first and foremost, what becomes of Horace under this new literary law? Where is his deep malice or his deep moral indignation? If the ridicule of folly be not satire, as well as the denunciation of vice, we must, we repeat, have a new definition of the word. We are ready to admit that there is a certain amount of unreality in the 'Imitations of Horace.' But it is questionable if they are a fair criterion. In the Moral Essays all that is satirical seems to us bonâ fide satire; such for instance as the characters of Wharton, Addison, and Lord Hervey. Pope's characters of women are, no doubt, pointed with less personal acrimony. Many of them are little more than the prose banter of the Spectator' thrown into verse. But the character of Atossa is not only full of moral indignation, but also of deep feeling. Surely, even on De Quincey's own showing, this is satire. Genius, wealth, high position, with the opportunities of doing good which these gifts carry with them, all rendered useless by violent and uncontrolled passions, are a fit theme for satire, if any human frailty can supply one.

Take again the character of Sappho. There is personal malice enough to float a whole college of satirists. But in order to do full justice to Pope on this entire question we must bear steadily in mind the condition of aristocratic society in the reigns of the two first Georges. The Revolution of 1688, with all its benefits, had not been purchased for nothing. The means by which it was accomplished inflicted a severe blow upon the chivalrous,

high-toned sentiment of the seventeenth century. The personal character of the first Hanoverian princes was not calculated to restore it. The end of life was made undisguisedly to consist in obtaining the greatest number of its good things, without regard to the means. Intellectual culture had sunk to the lowest ebb, art was neglected, and literature despised. The want of taste, the want of heart, the want of all which gilds and civilizes self-indulgence and effeminacy, might well have roused to wrath less delicate organisations than Pope's. The evil wore out in time. Before Pope's death a change for the better had, in all probability, commenced. The thirty-years peace, which in England followed the Treaty of Utrecht, had been broken up, and the younger members of the aristocracy called away to manlier pursuits. It required, no doubt, the spectacle of a purer court to work the full change which English society underwent between the first quarter of the eighteenth century and the last. But, nevertheless, the Reformation had begun. The breeze had sprung up, and the plague had begun to pass away, ere the poet was gathered to his fathers. To deny that he in any way contributed to this good result, is to shut our eyes to the plainest phenomena of the period. We know by the bribes that were offered him that his social power was tremendous. We know against what vices he directed that power. And though it is possible that the sunshine of Addison may have conquered more sinners than the cutting blasts of Pope, yet it is not in nature that the latter should have worked no effect. It was no vain boast that was contained in these beautiful lines

'Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see

Men not afraid of God afraid of me.'

A companion paradox to the assertion that Pope was no satirist is the equally bold statement that Junius was no rhetorician. Here again we are thrown back upon the inquiry, what is Rhetoric? Nor can we find in the essay in which this opinion is broached any satisfactory answer to it. Rhetoric has many

instruments which are seldom all at the command of the same author. That Junius did not employ those which are most in favour with De Quincey, is quite possible. But in the majority of those which are specified by Aristotle he was not only a proficient himself, but the cause of proficiency in others. De Quincey was at liberty to give the world a new definition of Rhetoric, if he chose, which should shut its gates against the Letters of Junius, as he was at liberty to frame a new definition of Satire

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to exclude the Essays of Pope. But he has left them open; and while the laws of Aristotle are accepted in the one case, and the example of Horace in the other, it will be difficult to prevent our countryman from entering in.

We will not say whether the next and last point that we mean to notice separately can be properly described as a paradox. But we introduce it partly for the sake of its own intrinsic interest-partly because we cannot help more than half suspecting that De Quincey has in this case been guilty of something very like plagiarism. The point we are about to call attention to is an assertion of the similarity between Wordsworth and Euripides, as reformers of the public taste of their respective epochs. Now, we observe in De Quincey's article on Lessing an allusion to Lord Shaftesbury's writings on Taste; and upon turning to his Lordship's works, though not in the same treatise as that mentioned by De Quincey, we find the revival of simplicity in Athens attributed to Euripides and Demosthenes. Whatever, in the mean time, be De Quincey's obligation to Lord Shaftesbury, we believe that the opinion itself is of very doubtful validity. The common characteristic of the two poets,' says De Quincey, 'was that each strove to restore the poetic diction of his own age to the language of common life.' This is just one of that numerous class of generalisations which we admire and distrust at the same time. We admire it for the discovery of a particular coincidence hitherto unsuspected: we distrust it for the general error of which it is apparently the symptom. Both Wordsworth and Euripides rejected much of that professional, or as it were royal diction, which custom had consecrated to the use of poets. But they did not reject it in favour of the same substitute, nor instigated by the same motive. The one aimed at simplicity, the other at popularity; the one protested against the public taste, the other set it up as a standard. Both imitated the language of real life; but in England the language of real life was also the language of nature, while in Athens the language of real life had, if we may credit Aristophanes, become tainted with the jargon of the law courts. It was for pandering to this pernicious taste of his countrymen, for introducing into tragedy the argumentative displays of the dicasteria, that Aristophanes rebukes him and we can hardly suppose he would have selected these points for attack had they not been to a great extent the causes of the popularity of Euripides. And here, indeed, the fanciful in such matters might draw a closer parallel between him and Wordsworth than is afforded by their verbal innovations only. Euripides, the object of fierce hostility to the Tory Aristophanes, reminds

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us very strongly of the position of Wordsworth in relation to some of his critics. Both commenced their innovations at a period when the political passions of their respective countries were in a state of violent excitement. Departures of the most trifling character from established custom were received as evidences of a revolutionary habit of mind, to which Wordsworth's early political opinions, and the connexion of Euripides with the Sophists and his ambiguous tone regarding the national religion, lent additional colour. Aristophanes accordingly attacks the obnoxious tragedian in the very tone of a witty Church and State reviewer, who hated both his literary and political principles with equal violence. From this point of view, indeed, the parallel is curiously close.

It will be readily understood from all that has gone before that in what are commonly called practical matters De Quincey is not invariably a safe guide. His logic cuts like a razor; his imagination glows like a furnace. But just for this very reason he is an uncertain judge of those prosaic situations and unlogical arguments in and by which so much of the world's business is conducted. To have stood a contested election, or taken part in a parish vestry, would have greatly improved his judgment. And yet he himself saw clearly enough the danger to which we are exposed by ignoring the circumstances under which any given principle may be forced to evolve itself. He perceived this truth, but he did not always act upon it. His mind, in fact, whether by nature or by opium, was traversed by a vein of effeminacy which shrank from the real effort of compromise. We may observe this peculiarity in his disposition to extol Julius Cæsar at the expense of Cicero.

In De Quincey's views of English politics we observe the same want of practical sobriety. He goes much further, for instance, in his admiration of the Puritans than the facts of the case at all The Long Parliament is with him that noble Parliament.' From Wordsworth and Coleridge he had learned to depreciate Mr. Pitt. The French war of '93 he considered inexcusable. In all this we see the mind careless of detail, and satisfied with the contemplation of one or two salient points. But throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if we except the period which intervened between the death of Queen Anne and the battle of Culloden, there was as much to captivate the imagination upon the one side in politics as the other; and De Quincey had sufficient fairness to see that Whigs and Tories did during all that time represent the two halves of one great truth, and were not opposed to each other as truth and falsehood, as Whig writers and speakers delight to represent

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them. But his mind, which was prematurely virile, first began to think and question during the fever of the French Revolution. The first great mind to the influence of which he was subjected was Coleridge's. All conspired to imbue him with a dislike of the old forms and pedantic conservatism of the eighteenth century. He liked neither its Parr, nor its Paley, nor its Pitt, nor its Johnson, nor anything that belonged to it. sympathised as little with French Jacobinism as afterwards with French Imperialism. He was in fact a Tory from the spiritual and ideal side of Toryism; and during the rude material struggle of those early years this aspect of the creed was necessarily much out of sight. Latterly, however, and immediately after the Reform Bill, he became a Tory of the strictest sect. But this was rather because he revolted from the unimaginative and utilitarian character of Radicalism than because he approved the whole practical policy of the Tories. He was in many respects a 'Liberal' in the truest sense of the word. He was ready to challenge all comers, to investigate all problems, to hold every truth up to the light. But his well-trained intellect rested firmly on that deep and broad theory of politics which has its foundation in the ancient philosophy. That one thing is set over against another; that the universe is one vast fabric of graduated being rising tier above tier to the Deity; that each separate class is in itself a miniature of the whole; that each has a proper principle, according to which its own separate parts are adjusted to each other; and that each may be thrown into confusion if it attempt to move (progress) in disregard of this principle; these were the apyaì, or starting-points, which formed the basis of De Quincey's creed. The fact that modern Radicalism was characterised by an avowed contempt of this principle or idéa, which underlay the organism of any given society, was sufficient to make De Quincey a Tory. The systematic preference of the γνωριμώτερον ἡμῖν to the φύσει γνωριμώτερον; the assertion that every particular, immediate, and sensible anomaly, or inconsistency, was all that concerned us; and that any anxiety to harmonize the correction of local disorders with the operation of a higher law was unworthy of a man of sense: these were the vulgarisms which drew an impassable line of demarcation between himself and the modern school of Reformers. These men, according to De Quincey's theory, approach every subject at the wrong end. Instead of examining the idea, law, or final cause, of any institution, and trying to ascertain whether that has been worked out, and the institution is consequently effete, they fasten their gaze solely upon some ephemeral or aberratic development in some particular direction, which they

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