ly
material a novelish or at least a romantic character, which is
sometimes--nay, very often--utterly wanting in professed and admitted
masters of the business; and he combines with this faculty--or rather he
exalts and transports it into--a strange and exquisite charm, which
nobody else in French, except Nodier[237] (who very possibly taught
Gerard something), possesses, and which, though it is rather commoner in
English and in the best and now almost prehistoric German, is rare
anywhere, and, in Gerard's peculiar brand of it, almost entirely
unknown.

For this "Anodos"--the most unquestionably entitled to that title of all
men in letters; this wayless wanderer on the earth and above the earth;
this inhabitant of mad-houses; this victim, finally, either of his own
despair and sorrow or of some devilry on the part of others,[238]
unites, in the strange spell which he casts over all fit readers, what,
but for him, one might have called the idiosyncrasies in strangeness of
authors quite different from each other and--except at the special
points of contact--from him. He is like Borrow or De Quincey (though he
goes even beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investing
known places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence and
second intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping from
quaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment and
emotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gerard
resembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines
"on the further side of the border between verse and music"--a remark
which applies to his prose as well.[239] He has himself admitted a kind
of _sorites_ of indebtedness to Diderot, Sterne, Swift, Rabelais,
Folengo, Lucian, and Petronius. But this is merely on the comic and
purely intellectual side of him, while it is further confined, or nearly
so, to the trick of deliberate "promiscuousness." On the
emotional-romantic if not even tragic score he may write off all imputed
indebtedness--save once more in some degree, to Nodier. And the
consequence is that those who delight in him derive their delight from
sources of the most extraordinarily various character, probably never
represented by an exactly similar group in the case of any two
individual lovers, but quite inexhaustible. To represent him to those
who do not know him is not easy; to represent him to those who do is
sure, for this very reason, to