rying also.
But, in truth, except those wonderful purple patches of "numerous"
prose, which are stuck all about the work, and perhaps in strictness not
excepting them, everything that De Quincey wrote, whether it was dream
or reminiscence, literary criticism or historical study, politics or
political economy, had one characteristic so strongly impressed on it as
to dwarf and obscure the differences of subject. It is not very easy to
find a description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of
this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's
conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor
Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and
delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the
remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it adduced here
in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De
Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are
exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing imaginary
conversations attributed to him in the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, which are
said, by good authorities, exactly to represent his way of talk, this
quality of rigmarole appears. It is absolutely impossible for him to
keep to his subject, or any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull
himself up briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest
passages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the
will-o'-the-wisp of divagation. In his later re-handlings of his work,
he did to some extent limit his followings of this will-o'-the-wisp to
notes, but by no means always; and both in his later and in his earlier
work, as it was written for the first time, he indulged them freely in
the text.

For pure rigmarole, for stories, as Mr. Chadband has it, "of a cock and
of a bull, and of a lady and of a half-crown," few things, even in De
Quincey, can exceed, and nothing out of De Quincey can approach, the
passages about the woman he met on the "cop" at Chester, and about the
Greek letter that he did not send to the Bishop of Bangor, in the
preliminary part of the _Confessions_. The first is the more teasing,
because with a quite elvish superfluity of naughtiness he has here
indulged in a kind of double rigmarole about the woman and the "bore"
in the river, and flits from one to the other, and from the other to the
one (his main story standing still the while), for half a dozen pa