opedia Britannica_.

De Quincey's style is a revelation of the beauty of the English language,
and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the
Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,--diffuseness, which continually
leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes
him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or
witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these
faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style
in our language. Though he was profoundly influenced by the seventeenth-
century writers, he attempted definitely to create a new style which should
combine the best elements of prose and poetry. In consequence, his prose
works are often, like those of Milton, more imaginative and melodious than
much of our poetry. He has been well called "the psychologist of style,"
and as such his works will never be popular; but to the few who can
appreciate him he will always be an inspiration to better writing. One has
a deeper respect for our English language and literature after reading him.

SECONDARY WRITERS OF ROMANTICISM. One has only to glance back over the
authors we have been studying--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Scott, Lamb, De Quincey--to realize the great change which
swept over the life and literature of England in a single half century,
under two influences which we now know as the French Revolution in history
and the Romantic Movement in literature. In life men had rebelled against
the too strict authority of state and society; in literature they rebelled
even more vigorously against the bonds of classicism, which had sternly
repressed a writer's ambition to follow his own ideals and to express them
in his own way. Naturally such an age of revolution was essentially
poetic,--only the Elizabethan Age surpasses it in this respect,--and it
produced a large number of minor writers, who followed more or less closely
the example of its great leaders. Among novelists we have Jane Austen,
Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter, and Susan Ferrier,--all
women, be it noted; among the poets, Campbell, Moore, Hogg ("the Ettrick
Shepherd"), Mrs. Hemans, Heber, Keble, Hood, and "Ingoldsby" (Richard
Barham); and among miscellaneous writers, Sidney Smith, "Christopher North"
(John Wilson), Chalmers, Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Hallam, and Landor.
Here is an astonishing variety of