are, after
all, of minor importance, the accidents, not the essentials in the
life and personality of this remarkable man. The points that should
attract our notice, the qualities that really give distinction to De
Quincey, are the broad sweep of his knowledge, almost unlimited in its
scope and singularly accurate in its details, a facility of phrasing
and a word supply that transformed the mere power of discriminating
expression into a fine art, and a style that, while it lapsed
occasionally from the standard of its own excellence, was generally
self-corrective and frequently forsook the levels of commonplace
excellence for the highest reaches of impassioned prose. Nor is this
all. His pages do not lack in humor--humor of the truest and most
delicate type; and if De Quincey is at times impelled beyond the
bounds of taste, even these excursions demonstrate his power, at least
in handling the grotesque. His sympathies, however, are always
genuine, and often are profound. The pages of his autobiographic
essays reveal the strength of his affections, while in the
interpretation of such a character as that of Joan of Arc, or in
allusions like those to the pariahs,--defenceless outcasts from
society, by whose wretched lot his heart was often wrung,--he writes
in truest pathos.

Now sympathy is own child of the imagination, whether expressed in the
language of laughter or in the vernacular of tears; and the most
distinctive quality in the mental make-up of De Quincey was, after
all, this dominant imagination which was characteristic of the man
from childhood to old age. The Opium-Eater once defined the _great
scholar_ as "not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but
also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing
together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what
else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing
life." Such was De Quincey himself. He was a scholar born, gifted with
a mind apt for the subtleties of metaphysics, a memory well-nigh
inexhaustible in the recovery of facts; in one respect, at least, he
was a _great_ scholar, for his mind was dominated by an imagination as
vigorous as that which created Macaulay's _England_, almost as
sensitive to dramatic effect as that which painted Carlyle's _French
Revolution_. Therefore when he wrote narrative, historical narrative,
or reminiscence, he lived in the experiences he pictured, as great
historians do; p