great impression upon the
world are those of St. Augustine and of Rousseau; but, with one short
exception in St. Augustine, neither of those compositions contains any
passion, and, therefore, De Quincey stands absolutely alone as the
inventor and sole performer on a new musical instrument--for such an
instrument is the English language in his hands. He belongs to a genus
in which he is the only individual. The novelty and the difficulty of
the task must be his apology if he fails, and causes of additional glory
if he succeeds. He alone of all human beings who have written since the
world began, has entered a path, which the absence of rivals proves to
be encumbered with some unusual obstacles. The accuracy and value of so
bold a claim require a short examination. After all, every writer,
however obscure, may contrive by a judicious definition to put himself
into a solitary class. He has some peculiarities which distinguish him
from all other mortals. He is the only journalist who writes at a given
epoch from a particular garret in Grub Street, or the only poet who is
exactly six feet high and measures precisely forty-two inches round the
chest. Any difference whatever may be applied to purposes of
classification, and the question is whether the difference is, or is
not, of much importance. By examining, therefore, the propriety of De
Quincey's view of his own place in literature, we shall be naturally led
to some valuation of his distinctive merits. In deciding whether a bat
should be classed with birds or beasts, we have to determine the nature
of the beast and the true theory of his wings. And De Quincey, if the
comparison be not too quaint, is like the bat, an ambiguous character,
rising on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetical region.

De Quincey, then, announces himself as an impassioned writer, as a
writer in impassioned prose, and, finally, as applying impassioned prose
to confessions. The first question suggested by this assertion concerns
the sense of the word 'impassioned.' There is very little of what one
ordinarily means by passion in the Confessions or elsewhere. There are
no explosions of political wrath, such as animate the 'Letters on a
Regicide Peace,' or of a deep religious emotion, which breathes through
many of our greatest prose writers. The language is undoubtedly a
vehicle for sentiments of a certain kind, but hardly of that burning and
impetuous order which we generally indicate