ame or so, and at times begin to write
what might be the opening pages of the preface to some very great work
of the future. Alas! the first digression diverts the thread of the
discourse; the task becomes troublesome, and the labour is abruptly
broken off. And so in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey read
extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quantity of
opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new capacities in the language,
and provided a good deal of respectable padding for magazines. It
sounds, and many people will say that it is, a harsh and, perhaps they
will add, a stupid judgment. If so, they may find plenty of admirers who
will supply the eulogistic side here too briefly indicated. I will only
say two things: first, that there are very few writers who have revealed
new capacities in the language, and in English literature they might
almost be counted on the fingers. Secondly, I must confess that I have
often consulted De Quincey in regard to biographic and critical
questions, and that though I have generally found something to admire, I
have always found gross inaccuracies and almost always effeminate
prejudices and mere flippancies draped in elaborate rhetoric. I take
leave, therefore, to insist upon faults which are passed over too easily
by writers of more geniality than I claim to possess.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] It is curious that De Quincey, in his Essay on Style, explains that
political economy, and especially the doctrine of value, is one of those
subjects which cannot be satisfactorily treated in dialogue--the very
form which he chose to adopt for that particular purpose.

_SIR THOMAS BROWNE_

'Let me not injure the felicity of others,' says Sir Thomas Browne in a
suppressed passage of the 'Religio Medici,' 'if I say that I am the
happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty into
riches, adversity into prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than
Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.' Perhaps on second
thoughts, Sir Thomas felt that the phrase savoured of that presumption
which is supposed to provoke the wrath of Nemesis; and at any rate, he,
of all men, is the last to be taken too literally at his word. He is a
humorist to the core, and is here writing dramatically. There are many
things in this book, so he tells us, 'delivered rhetorically, many
expressions therein merely tropical,... and therefore also many things
to be taken in a soft and fle