erhaps living over again the scenes of the past, or
for the first time making real the details of occurrences with which
he was only recently familiar.

The _Revolt of the Tartars_ is a good illustration of his power.
Attracted by the chance reading of an obscure French missionary and
traveller to the dramatic possibilities of an episode in Russian
history, De Quincey built from the bare notes thus discovered,
supplemented by others drawn from a matter-of-fact German
archaeologist, a narrative which for vividness of detail and
truthfulness of local color belongs among the best of those classics
in which fancy helps to illuminate fact, and where the imagination is
invoked to recreate what one feels intuitively must have been real.

The _Revolt of the Tartars_, while not exhibiting the highest
achievement of the author's power, nevertheless belongs in the group
of writings wherein his peculiar excellences are fairly manifested.
The obvious quality of its realism has been pointed out already; the
masterly use of the principles of suspense and stimulated interest
will hardly pass unnoticed. A negative excellence is the absence of
that discursiveness in composition, that tendency to digress into
superfluous comment, which is this author's one prevailing fault. De
Quincey was gifted with a fine appreciation of harmonious sound, and
in those passages where his spirit soars highest not the least of
their beauties is found in the melodiousness of their tone and the
rhythmic sweetness of their motion.

It is as a master of rhetoric that De Quincey is distinguished among
writers. Some hints of his ability are seen in the opening and closing
passages of this essay, but to find him at his best one must turn to
the _Confessions_ and to the other papers which describe his life,
particularly those which recount his marvellous dreams. In these
papers we find the passages where De Quincey's passion rises to the
heights which few other writers have ever reached in prose, a
loftiness and grandeur which is technically denominated as "sublime."
In his _Essay on Style_, published in _Blackwood's_, 1840, he
deprecates the usual indifference to form, on the part of English
writers, "the tendency of the national mind to value the matter of a
book not only as paramount to the manner, but even as distinct from it
and as capable of a separate insulation." As one of the great masters
of prose style in this century, De Quincey has so served the in