authorities agree as to the exceptional combination of scholarliness and
courtliness which marked De Quincey's colloquial style and expression.
Wilson's daughter, Mrs. Gordon, says that he used to address her
father's cook "as if she had been a duchess"; and that the cook, though
much flattered, was somewhat aghast at his _punctilio_. That a man of
this kind should think it both allowable and funny to talk of Josephus
as "Joe," and of Magliabecchi as "Mag," may be only a new example of
that odd law of human nature which constantly prompts people in various
relations of life, and not least in literature, to assume most the
particular qualities (not always virtues or graces) that they have not.
Yet it is fair to remember that Wilson and the _Blackwood_ set, together
with not a few writers in the _London Magazine_--the two literary
coteries in connexion with whom De Quincey started as a writer--had
deliberately imported this element of horse-play into literature, that
it at least did not seem to interfere with their popularity, and that De
Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life
to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had
always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on
Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits
awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable
simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man."
Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he also--as in the passage
about the fate which waited upon all who possessed anything which might
be convenient to Wordsworth, if they died--can manage a certain kind of
sly humour not much less admirably. But "Joe" and "Mag," and, to take
another example, the stuff about Catalina's "crocodile papa" in _The
Spanish Nun_, are neither grim nor sly, they are only puerile. His
stanchest defender asks, "why De Quincey should not have the same
license as Swift and Thackeray?" The answer is quick and crushing. Swift
and Thackeray justify their license by their use of it; De Quincey does
not. After which it is hardly necessary to add, though this is almost
final in itself, that neither Swift nor Thackeray interlards perfectly
and unaffectedly serious work with mere fooling of the "Joe" and "Mag"
kind. Swift did not put _mollis abuti_ in the _Four last years of Queen
Anne_, nor Thackeray his _Punch_ jokes in the death-scene of Colonel
Newcome. I c