ut pungent
humour, quick insight, deep passion, and general power of mind, such as
is given to few men in a century. But, as in his case the thought is
really incarnated in the language we cannot criticise the style
separately from the thoughts, or we can only assign, as its highest
merit, its admirable fitness for producing the desired effect. It would
be wrong to invert De Quincey's censure, and blame him because his
gorgeous robes are not fitted for more practical purposes. To everything
there is a time; for plain English, and for De Quincey's highly-wrought
passages.

It would be difficult or impossible, and certainly it would be
superfluous, to define with any precision the peculiar flavour of De
Quincey's style. A few specimens would do more than any description; and
De Quincey is too well known to justify quotation. It may be enough to
notice that most of his brilliant performances are variations on the
same theme. He appeals to our terror of the infinite, to the shrinking
of the human mind before astronomical distances and geological periods
of time. He paints vast perspectives, opening in long succession, till
we grow dizzy in the contemplation. The cadence of his style suggests
sounds echoing each other, and growing gradually fainter, till they die
away into infinite distance. Two great characteristics, he tells us, of
his opium dreams were a deep-seated melancholy and an exaggeration of
the things of space and time. Nightly he descended 'into chasms and
sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that
he could ever reascend.' He saw buildings and landscapes 'in proportion
so vast as the human eye is not fitted to receive.' He seemed to live
ninety or a hundred years in a night, and even to pass through periods
far beyond the limits of human existence. Melancholy and an awe-stricken
sense of the vast and vague are the emotions which he communicates with
the greatest power; though the melancholy is too dreamy to deserve the
name of passion, and the terror of the infinite is not explicitly
connected with any religious emotion. It is a proof of the fineness of
his taste, that he scarcely ever falls into bombast; we tremble at his
audacity in accumulating gorgeous phrases; but we confess that he is
justified by the result. The only exception that I can remember is the
passage in 'The English Mailcoach,' where his exaggerated patriotism
leads him into what strikes me at least as a rather vul