e can understand the admiration which he
bestows upon the opening bar of a passage in the Urn-burial:--'Now since
these bones have rested quietly in the grave under the drums and
tramplings of three conquests,' &c. 'What a melodious ascent,' he
exclaims, 'as of a prelude to some impassioned requiem breathing from
the pomps of earth and from the sanctities of the grave! What a _fluctus
decumanus_ of rhetoric! Time expounded, not by generations or centuries,
but by vast periods of conquests and dynasties; by cycles of Pharaohs
and Ptolemies, Antiochi and Arsacides! And these vast successions of
time distinguished and figured by the uproars which revolve at their
inaugurations; by the drums and tramplings rolling overhead upon the
chambers of forgotten dead--the trepidations of time and mortality
vexing, at secular intervals, the everlasting sabbaths of the grave!'

The commentator is seeking to eclipse the text, and his words are at
once a description and an example of his own most characteristic
rhetoric. Wordsworth once uttered an aphorism which De Quincey repeats
with great admiration: that language is not, as I have just said, the
dress, but 'the incarnation of thought.' But though accepting and
enforcing the doctrine by showing that the 'mixture is too subtle, the
intertexture too ineffable' to admit of expression, he condemns the
style which is the best illustration of its truth. He is very angry with
the admirers of Swift; De Foe and 'many hundreds' of others wrote
something quite as good; it only wanted 'plain good sense, natural
feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting
together the clockwork of sentences, and, above all, the advantage of an
appropriate subject.' Could Swift, he asks, have written a pendant to
passages in Sir W. Raleigh, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor? He
would have cut the same figure as 'a forlorn scullion from a greasy
eating-house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in vision to act as
seneschal to the festival of Belshazzar the King, before a thousand of
his lords.' And what, we may retort, would Taylor, or Browne, or De
Quincey himself, have done, had one of them been wanted to write down
the project of Wood's halfpence in Ireland? He would have resembled a
king in his coronation robes compelled to lead a forlorn hope up the
scaling ladders. The fact is, that Swift required for his style not only
the plain good sense and other rare qualities enumerated, b