inally smoothed his way
to a fellowship. By which time, one is perfectly sick of the Bishop, and
of these speculations on the might-have-been, which are indeed by no
means unnatural, being exactly what every man indulges in now and then
in his own case, which, in conversation, would not be unpleasant, but
which, gradually and diffusedly set down in a book, and interrupting a
narrative, are most certainly "rigmarole."

Rigmarole, however, can be a very agreeable thing in its way, and De
Quincey has carried it to a point of perfection never reached by any
other rigmaroler. Despite his undoubted possession of a kind of humour,
it is a very remarkable thing that he rigmaroles, so far as can be made
out by the application of the most sensitive tests, quite seriously, and
almost, if not quite, unconsciously. These digressions or deviations are
studded with quips and jests, good, bad, and indifferent. But the writer
never seems to suspect that his own general attitude is at least
susceptible of being made fun of. It is said, and we can very well
believe it, that he was excessively annoyed at Lamb's delightful parody
of his _Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected_; and,
on the whole, I should say that no great man of letters in this century,
except Balzac and Victor Hugo, was so insensible to the ludicrous aspect
of his own performances. This in the author of the _Essay on Murder_ may
seem surprising, but, in fact, there are few things of which there are
so many subdivisions, or in which the subdivisions are marked off from
each other by such apparently impermeable lines, as humour. If I may
refine a little I should say that there was very frequently, if not
generally, a humorous basis for these divagations of De Quincey's; but
that he almost invariably lost sight of that basis, and proceeded to
reason quite gravely away from it, in what is (not entirely with
justice) called the scholastic manner. How much of this was due to the
influence of Jean Paul and the other German humorists of the last
century, with whom he became acquainted very early, I should not like to
say. I confess that my own enjoyment of Richter, which has nevertheless
been considerable, has always been lessened by the presence in him, to a
still greater degree, of this same habit of quasi-serious divagation. To
appreciate the mistake of it, it is only necessary to compare the manner
of Swift. The _Tale of a Tub_ is in appearance as daringly d