o was one of
Mathias' victims, declared that the verse was a "peg to hang the notes
on"; and the habit above referred to certainly justified the gibe to no
small extent. If the book is rather hard reading nowadays (and it is
certainly rather difficult to recognise in it even the "demon of
originality" which De Quincey himself grants rather grudgingly as an
offset to its defects of taste and scholarship), it is perhaps chiefly
obscured by the extreme desultoriness of the author's attacks and the
absence of any consistent and persistent target. Much that Mathias
reprehends in Godwin and Priestley, in Colman and Wolcot, and a whole
crowd of lesser men, is justifiably censured; much that he lays down is
sound and good enough. But the whole--which, after the wont of the time,
consists of several pieces jointed on to each other and all flooded with
notes--suffers from the twin vices of negation and divagation. Indeed,
its chief value is that, both by its composition and its reception, it
shows the general sense that literature was not in a healthy state, and
that some renaissance, some reaction, was necessary.

The prominence of the French Revolution, which has already appeared more
than once in the above account of late eighteenth century poetry, is
still more strongly reflected in the prose writing of the period.
Indeed, many of its principal writers devoted their chief attention
either to describing, to attacking, or to defending the events and
principles of this portentous phenomenon. The chief of them were John
Moore, Arthur Young, Helen Maria Williams, Thomas Paine, William Godwin,
Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Holcroft. Of these Price,
a veteran who had nearly reached his sixtieth year when our period
commences, chiefly belongs to literature as an antagonist of Burke, as
does Priestley, whose writing was very extensive, but who was as much
more a "natural philosopher" than a man of letters as Price was much
less a man of letters than a moralist and a statistician. Both,
moreover, have been mentioned in the preceding volume, and it is not
necessary to say much about them, or about John Horne Tooke (1736-1812),
philologist and firebrand.

Of the others something may, and in some cases not a little must,
appear. Dr. John Moore, sometimes called "Zeluco" Moore (from his most
popular book), and father of the general who fell at Corunna, was born
at Stirling in the winter of 1729-30. Studying medicine at Gl