an quite conceive De Quincey doing both.

And now I have done enough in the fault-finding way, and nothing shall
induce me to say another word of De Quincey in this article save in
praise. For praise he himself gives the amplest occasion; he might
almost remain unblamed altogether if his praisers had not been
frequently unwise, and if his _exemplar_ were not specially _vitiis
imitabile_. Few English writers have touched so large a number of
subjects with such competence both in information and in power of
handling. Still fewer have exhibited such remarkable logical faculty.
One main reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that
his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For
this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or
is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for
themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety
of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more
observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so
large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd
suspicion, what De Quincey will say on any subject; his gift of sighting
and approaching new facets of it is so immense. Whether he was in truth
as accomplished a classical scholar as he claimed to be I do not know;
he has left few positive documents to tell us. But I should think that
he was, for he has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and
rarest kind--the scholar who is exact as to language without failing to
comprehend literature, and competent in literature without being
slipshod as to language. His historical insight, of which the famous
_Caesars_ is the best example, was, though sometimes coloured by his
fancy, and at other times distorted by a slight tendency to
_supercherie_ as in _The Tartars_ and _The Spanish Nun_, wonderfully
powerful and acute. He was not exactly as Southey was, "omnilegent"; but
in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below
the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.
Of the two classes of severer study to which he specially addicted
himself, his political economy suffered perhaps a little, acute as his
views in it often are, from the fact that in his time it was practically
a new study, and that he had neither sufficient facts nor sufficient
literature to go upon. In metaphysics, to which he gave himself