ut conventional style of the eighteenth. Ruskin and Carlyle have
both the same element of _bravura_, as will be seen if one tries to
analyze their best passages as music. But in De Quincey this lyric
arrangement is at once more delicate and more obvious, as the reader may
assure himself if he re-read his favorite passages, noticing how many of
them are in essence exclamatory, or actually vocative, as it were. In
this ideal of impassioned prose De Quincey gave to the prose of the
latter part of the century its keynote. Macaulay is everywhere equally
impassioned or unimpassioned; the smooth-flowing and useful canal,
rather than the picturesque river in which rapids follow the long
reaches of even water, and are in turn succeeded by them. To conceive of
style as music,--as symmetry, proportion, and measure, only secondarily
dependent on the clear exposition of the actual subject-matter,--that is
De Quincey's ideal, and there Pater and Stevenson have followed him.

De Quincey's fame has not gone far beyond the circle of those who speak
his native tongue. A recent French critic finds him rough and rude,
sinister even in his wit. In that circle however his reputation has been
high, though he has not been without stern critics. Mr. Leslie Stephen
insists that his logic is more apparent than real: that his humor is
spun out and trivial, his jests ill-timed and ill-made. His claim that
his 'Confessions' created a new _genre_ is futile; they confess nothing
epoch-making,--no real crises of soul, merely the adventures of a truant
schoolboy, the recollections of a drunkard. He was full of contemptuous
and effeminate British prejudices against agnosticism and Continental
geniuses. "And so," Mr. Stephen continues, "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 the magazines."

Not a single one of the charges can be wholly denied; on analysis De
Quincey proves guilty of all these offenses against ideal culture. Rough
jocoseness, diffusiveness, local prejudice, a life spent on details, a
lack of philosophy.--these are faults, but they are British faults,
Anglo-Saxon faults. They scarcely limit affection or greatly diminish
respect. De Quincey was a sophist, a rhetorician, a brilliant talker.
There are men of that sort in every club, in every c