fied with
amusement and surprise. One good thing was, that nobody's name and fame
could be really injured by any thing DeQuincey could say. There was such
a grotesque air about the mode of his evil speaking, and it was so
gratuitous and excessive, that the hearer could not help regarding it as
a singular sort of intellectual exercise, or an effort in the speaker to
observe, for once, something outside of himself, rather than as any
token of actual feeling towards the ostensible object.

Let this strange commentator on individual character meet with more
mercy and a wiser interpretation than he was himself capable of. He was
not made like other men; and he did not live, think, or feel like them.
A singular organization was singularly and fatally deranged in its
action before it could show its best quality. Marvelous analytical
faculty he had; but it all oozed out in barren words. Charming eloquence
he had; but it degenerated into egotistical garrulity, rendered tempting
by the gilding of his genius. It is questionable whether, if he had
never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been
substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable stand-point of
philosophical investigation; but the actual effect of his intemperance
was to aggravate to excess his introspective tendencies, and to remove
him incessantly further from the needful discipline of true science. His
conditions of body and mind were abnormal, and his study of the one
thing he knew any thing about--the human mind--was radically imperfect.
His powers, noble and charming as they might have been, were at once
wasted and weakened through their own partial excess. His moral nature
relaxed and sank, as must always be the case where sensibility is
stimulated and action paralyzed; and the man of genius who, forty years
before his death, administered a moral warning to all England, and
commanded the sympathy and admiration of a nation, lived on, to achieve
nothing but the delivery of some confidences of questionable value and
beauty, and to command from us nothing more than a compassionate sorrow
that an intellect so subtle and an eloquence so charming in its pathos,
its humor, its insight, and its music, should have left the world in no
way the better for such gifts, unless by the warning afforded in
"Confessions" first, and then, by example, against the curse which
neutralized their influence and corrupted its source.--HARRIET
MARTINEAU.

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