is quite adequate to the
sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense.
And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length--even
in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, _tour de
force_ on Our Lady of Darkness--De Quincey ever quite equalled the
combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come
close to it. The _Suspiria_ are full of such passages--there are even
some who prefer _Savannah la Mar_ to the _Ladies of Sorrow_. Beautiful
as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears
there. The famous passages of the _Confessions_ are in every one's
memory; and so I suppose is the _Vision of Sudden Death_. Many passages
in _The Caesars_, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and
the close of _Joan of Arc_ is as famous as the most ambitious attempts
of the _Confessions_ and the _Mail Coach_. Moreover, in all the sixteen
volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there,
alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt
often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into
questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his
rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their
tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would
imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it
does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast,
deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey--stronger than in
any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master,
Wilson.

The great advantage that De Quincey has, not only over this friend of
his but over all practitioners of the ornate style in this century, lies
in his sureness of hand in the first place, and secondly in the
comparative frugality of means which perhaps is an inseparable
accompaniment of sureness of hand. To mention living persons would be
invidious; but Wilson and Landor are within the most scrupulous critic's
right of comparison. All three were contemporaries; all three were
Oxford men--Landor about ten years senior to the other two--and all
three in their different ways set themselves deliberately to reverse the
practice of English prose for nearly a century and a half. They did
great things, but De Quincey did, I think, the greatest and certainly
the most classical in the proper sense, for all L