16]

In not a few respects the literary lot of Thomas De Quincey, both during
his life and after it, has been exceedingly peculiar. In one respect it
has been unique. I do not know that any other author of anything like
his merit, during our time, has had a piece of work published for fully
twenty years as his, only for it to be excluded as somebody else's at
the end of that time. Certainly _The Traditions of the Rabbins_ was very
De Quinceyish; indeed, it was so De Quinceyish that the discovery, after
such a length of time, that it was not De Quincey's at all, but
"Salathiel" Croly's, must have given unpleasant qualms to more than one
critic accustomed to be positive on internal evidence. But if De Quincey
had thus attributed to him work that was not his, he has also had the
utmost difficulty in getting attributed to him, in any accessible form,
work that was his own. Three, or nominally four, editions--one in the
decade of his death, superintended for the most part by himself; another
in 1862, whose blue coat and white labels dwell in the fond memory; and
another in 1878 (reprinted in 1880) a little altered and enlarged, with
the Rabbins turned out and more soberly clad, but identical in the
main--put before the British public for some thirty-five years a certain
portion of his strange, long-delayed, but voluminous work. This work had
occupied him for about the same period, that is to say for the last and
shorter half of his extraordinary and yet uneventful life. Now, after
much praying of readers, and grumbling of critics, we have a fifth and
definitive edition from the English critic who has given most attention
to De Quincey, Professor Masson.[17] I may say, with hearty
acknowledgment of Mr. Masson's services to English literature, that I do
not very much like this last edition. De Quincey, never much favoured by
the mechanical producers of books, has had his sizings, as Byron would
say, still further stinted in the matter of print, margins, and the
like; and what I cannot but regard as a rather unceremonious tampering
with his own arrangement has taken place, the new matter being not added
in supplementary volumes or in appendices to the reprinted volumes, but
thrust into or between the separate essays, sometimes to the destruction
of De Quincey's "redaction" altogether, and always to the confusion and
dislocation of his arrangement, which has also been neglected in other
ways. Still the actual generation of read