range of subject-matter,--from the 'Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth' to
the 'Casuistry of Roman Meals' and the 'Toilet of a Hebrew Lady.' His
topics are always piquant. Like Poe, De Quincey loved puzzling
questions, the cryptograms, the tangled under sides of things, where
there are many and conflicting facts to sift and correlate, the points
that are now usually settled in foot-notes and by references to German
authorities. In dealing with such subjects he showed not only that he
possessed the same keen logic which entertains us in Poe, but that he
was the master of great stores of learned information. We are never
wholly convinced, perhaps, of the eternal truth of his conclusions, but
we like to watch him arrive at them. They seem fresh and strange, and we
are dazzled by the constantly changing material. Nothing can be more
delightful than the constant influx of new objects of thought, the
unexpected incidents, the seemingly inexpugnable logic that ends in
paradox, the play of human interest in a topic to which all living
interest seems alien. There is scarcely a page in all De Quincey's
writings that taken by itself is actually dull. In each, one receives a
vivid impression of the same lithe and active mind, examining with
lively curiosity even a recondite subject: cracking a joke here and
dropping a tear there, and never intermitting the smooth flow of acute
but often irrelevant observation. The generation that habitually
neglects De Quincey has lost little important historical and
philosophical information, perhaps, but it has certainly deprived itself
of a constant source of entertainment.

As a stylist De Quincey marked a new ideal in English; that of
impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,--prose which deliberately
exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its. And it was really as
an opera that De Quincey conceived of the essay. It was to have its
recitatives, its mediocre passages, the well and firmly handled parts of
ordinary discourse. All comparatively unornamented matter was, however,
but preparative to the lyric outburst,--the strophe and antistrophe of
modulated song. In this conception of style others had preceded
him,--Milton notably,--but only half consciously and not with sustained
success. There could be no great English prose until the eighteenth
century had trimmed the tangled periods of the seventeenth, and the
romantic movement of the nineteenth added fire and enthusiasm to the
clear b