fort in fiction, entitled _Klosterheim_;
and the _Logic of Political Economy_. Towards the end of his life he
superintended an English collection--there had already been one in
America--of his essays, and this has been supplemented more than once
since.

It may, indeed, fairly be doubted whether so large a collection, of
miscellaneous, heterogeneous, and, to tell the truth, very unequally
interesting and meritorious matter, has ever been received with greater
or more lasting popular favour, a fresh edition of the fourteen or
sixteen volumes of the _Works_ having been called for on an average
every decade. There have been dissidents: and recently in particular
something of a set has been made against De Quincey--a set to some
extent helped by the gradual addition to the _Works_ of a great deal of
unimportant matter which he had not himself cared to reproduce. This,
indeed, is perhaps the greatest danger to which the periodical writer is
after his death exposed, and is even the most serious drawback to
periodical writing. It is impossible that any man who lives by such
writing can always be at his best in form, and he will sometimes be
compelled to execute what Carlyle has called "honest journey-work in
default of better,"--work which, though perfectly honest and perfectly
respectable, is mere journey-work, and has no claim to be disturbed from
its rest when its journey is accomplished. Of this there was some even
in De Quincey's own collection, and the proportion has been much
increased since. Moreover, even at his very best, he was not a writer
who could be trusted to keep himself at that best. His reading was
enormous,--nearly as great perhaps as Southey's, though in still less
popular directions,--and he would sometimes drag it in rather
inappropriately. He had an unconquerable and sometimes very irritating
habit of digression, of divagation, of aside. And, worst of all, his
humour, which in its own peculiar vein of imaginative grotesque has
seldom been surpassed, was liable constantly to degenerate into a kind
of laboured trifling, inexpressibly exasperating to the nerves. He could
be simply dull; and he can seldom be credited with the possession of
what may be called literary tact.

Yet his merits were such as to give him no superior in his own manner
among the essayists, and hardly any among the prose writers of the
century. He, like Wilson, and probably before Wilson, deliberately aimed
at a style of gorgeous el