e, without a tenth part of the logical apparatus, would have exposed
the fallacy in a sentence. Paley, whom he never tires of treating to
contemptuous abuse, was incapable of such feeble sophistry. De Quincey,
in short, was a very able expositor; but he was not, though under better
discipline he might probably have become, a sound original thinker. He
is an interpreter, not an originator of thought. His skill in setting
forth an argument blinds him to its most palpable defects. If language
is a powerful weapon in his hands, it is only when the direction of the
blow is dictated by some more manly, if less ingenious, understanding.

Let us inquire, and it is a more delicate question, whether he is better
qualified to use it as a plaything. He has a reputation as a humorist.
The Essay on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts is probably the
most popular of his writings. The conception is undoubtedly meritorious,
and De Quincey returns to it more than once in his other works. The
description of the Williams murders is inimitable, and the execution
even in the humorous passages is frequently good. We may praise
particular sentences: such as the well-known remark that 'if a man once
indulges himself in murder, he comes to think little of robbing; and
from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking; and from
that to incivility and procrastination.' One laughs at this whimsical
inversion; but I don't think one laughs very heartily; and certainly one
does not find, as in really deep humour, that the paradox is pregnant
with further meaning, and the laugh a prelude to a more melancholy
smile. Many of the best things ever said are couched in a similar form:
the old remark that the use of language is the concealment of thought;
the saying that the half is greater than the whole, and that two and two
don't always make four, are familiar instances; but each of them really
contains a profound truth expressed in a paradoxical form, which is a
sufficient justification of their extraordinary popularity. But if every
inversion of a commonplace were humorous, we should be able to make
jokes by machinery. There is no humour that I can see in the statement
that honesty is the worst policy, or that procrastination saves time;
and De Quincey's phrase, though I admit that it is amusing as a kind of
summary of his essay, seems to me to rank little higher than an
ingenious pun. It is a clever trick of language, but does not lead any