iscursive as
anything can be, but the author in the first place never loses his way,
and in the second never fails to keep a watchful eye on himself, lest he
should be getting too serious or too tedious. That is what Richter and
De Quincey fail to do.

Yet though these drawbacks are grave, and though they are (to judge from
my own experience) felt more seriously at each successive reading, most
assuredly no man who loves English literature could spare De Quincey
from it; most assuredly all who love English literature would sooner
spare some much more faultless writers. Even that quality of his which
has been already noted, his extraordinary attraction for youth, is a
singular and priceless one. The Master of the Court of the Gentiles, or
the Instructor of the Sons of the Prophets, he might be called in a
fantastic nomenclature, which he would have himself appreciated, if it
had been applied to any one but himself. What he somewhere calls his
"extraordinary ignorance of daily life" does not revolt youth. His
little pedantries, which to the day of his death were like those of a
clever schoolboy, appeal directly to it. His best fun is quite
intelligible; his worst not wholly uncongenial. His habit (a certain
most respected professor in a northern university may recognise the
words) of "getting into logical coaches and letting himself be carried
on without minding where he is going" is anything but repugnant to brisk
minds of seventeen. They are quite able to comprehend the great if
mannered beauty of his finest style--the style, to quote his own words
once more, as of "an elaborate and pompous sunset." Such a schoolmaster
to bring youths of promise, not merely to good literature but to the
best, nowhere else exists. But he is much more than a mere schoolmaster,
and in order that we may see what he is, it is desirable first of all to
despatch two other objections made to him from different quarters, and
on different lines of thought. The one objection (I should say that I do
not fully espouse either of them) is that he is an untrustworthy critic
of books; the other is that he is a very spiteful commentator on men.

This latter charge has found wide acceptance and has been practically
corroborated and endorsed by persons as different as Southey and
Carlyle. It would not in any case concern us much, for when a man is
once dead it matters uncommonly little whether he was personally
unamiable or not. But I think that De Quince