tion of
contemptuous prejudices. De Quincey thought himself entitled to treat
Locke as a shallow pretender. The whole eighteenth century was, with one
or two exceptions, a barren wilderness to him. He aspersed its
reasoners, from Locke to Paley; he scorned its poets with all the
bitterness of the school which first broke loose from the rule of Pope;
and its prose-writers, with the exception of Burke, were miserable
beings in his eyes. He would have seen with little regret a holocaust of
all the literature produced in England between the death of Milton and
the rise of Wordsworth. Naturally, he hated an infidel with that kind of
petulant bitterness which possesses an old lady in a country village,
who has just heard that some wicked people dispute the story of Balaam's
ass. And, as a corollary, he combined the whole French people in one
sweeping censure, and utterly despised their morals, manners,
literature, and political principles. He was a John Bull, as far as a
man can be who is of weakly, nervous temperament, and believes in Kant.

One or two illustrations may be given of the force of these effeminate
prejudices; and it is to be remarked with regret that they are
specially injurious in a department where he otherwise had eminent
merits, that, namely, of literary criticism. Any man who lived in the
eighteenth century was _prima facie_ a fool; if a free thinker, his case
was all but hopeless; but if a French free thinker, it was desperate
indeed. He lets us into the secret of his prejudices, which, indeed, is
tolerably transparent in his statement that he found it hard to
reverence Coleridge when he supposed him to be a Socinian. Now, though a
'liberal man,' he could not hold a Socinian to be a Christian; nor could
he 'think that any man, though he make himself a marvellously clever
disputant, ever could tower upwards into a very great philosopher,
unless he should begin or end with Christianity.' The canon may be
sound, but it at once destroys the pretensions of such men as Hobbes,
Spinoza, Hume, and even, though De Quincey considers him 'a dubious
exception,' Kant. Even heterodoxy is enough to alienate his sympathies.
'Think of a man,' he exclaims about poor Whiston, 'who had brilliant
preferment within his reach, dragging his poor wife and daughter for
half a century through the very mire of despondency and destitution,
because he disapproved of Athanasius, or because the "Shepherd of
Hermas" was not sufficiently