andor's superior air of
Hellenism. Voluble as De Quincey often is, he seems always to have felt
that when you are in your altitudes it is well not to stay there too
long. And his flights, while they are far more uniformly high than
Wilson's, which alternately soar and drag, are much more merciful in
regard of length than Landor's, as well as for the most part much more
closely connected with the sense of his subjects. There is scarcely one
of the _Imaginary Conversations_ which would not be the better for very
considerable thinning, while, with the exception perhaps of _The English
Mail Coach_, De Quincey's surplusage, obvious enough in many cases, is
scarcely ever found in his most elaborate and ornate passages. The total
amount of such passages in the _Confessions_ is by no means large, and
the more ambitious parts of the _Suspiria_ do not much exceed a dozen
pages. De Quincey was certainly justified by his own practice in
adopting and urging as he did the distinction, due, he says, to
Wordsworth, between the common and erroneous idea of style as the
_dress_ of thought, and the true definition of it as the _incarnation_
of thought. The most wizened of coxcombs may spend days and years in
dressing up his meagre and ugly carcass; but few are the sons of men who
have sufficient thought to provide the soul of any considerable series
of avatars. De Quincey had; and therefore, though the manner (with
certain exceptions heretofore taken) in him is always worth attention,
it never need or should divert attention from the matter. And thus he
was not driven to make a little thought do tyrannous duty as lay-figure
for an infinite amount of dress, or to hang out frippery on a
clothes-line with not so much as a lay-figure inside it. Even when he is
most conspicuously "fighting a prize," there is always solid stuff in
him.

Few indeed are the writers of whom so much can be said, and fewer still
the miscellaneous writers, among whom De Quincey must be classed. On
almost any subject that interested him--and the number of such subjects
was astonishing, curious as are the gaps between the different groups of
them--what he has to say is pretty sure, even if it be the wildest
paradox in appearance, to be worth attending to. And in regard to most
things that he has to say, the reader may be pretty sure also that he
will not find them better said elsewhere. It has sometimes been
complained by students, both of De Quincey the man and of De