but how is he to evince it? He may go through a train of the profoundest thoughts in his own mind; but into what voluminous fairy circle is he to compress them? Poetry can paint whole galleries in a page, while her sister art requires heaps of canvas to render a few of her poems visible.

(From Imagination and Fancy.)

THE HOUSE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HIPPOCRATES

IN the time of the Norman reign in Sicily, a vessel bound from that island for Smyrna was driven by a westerly wind upon the island of Cos. The crew did not know where they were, though they had often visited the island; for the trading towns lay in other quarters, and they saw nothing before them but woods and solitudes. They found, however, a comfortable harbour; and the wind having fallen in the night, they went on shore next morning for water. The country proved as solitary as they thought it; which was the more extraordinary, inasmuch as it was very luxuriant, full of wild figs and grapes, with a rich uneven ground, and stocked with goats and other animals, who fled whenever they appeared. The bees were remarkably numerous; so that the wild honey, fruits, and delicious water, especially one spring which fell into a beautiful marble basin, made them more and more wonder, at every step, that they could see no human inhabitants.

Thus idling about and wondering, stretching themselves now and then among the wild thyme and grass, and now getting up to look at some specially fertile place which another called them to see, and which they thought might be turned to fine trading purpose, they came upon a mound covered with trees, which looked into a flat, wide lawn of rank grass, with a house at the end of it. They crept nearer towards the house along the mound, still continuing among the trees, for fear they were trespassing at last upon somebody's property. It had a large garden wall at the back, as much covered with ivy as if it had been built of it. Fruit-trees looked over the wall with an unpruned thickness; and neither at the back nor front of the house were there any signs of humanity. It was an ancient marble building, where glass was not to be expected in the windows; but it was much

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dilapidated, and the grass grew up over the steps. They listened again and again; but nothing was to be heard like a sound of men; nor scarcely of anything else. There was an intense noonday silence. Only the hares made a rustling noise as they ran about the long hiding grass. The house looked like the tomb of human nature amidst the vitality of earth.

(From Essays.)

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

[Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester, 15th August 1785, being the fifth son of Thomas Quincey, a merchant of some literary taste, who died in 1792. After a varied experience of school life, he ran away, in 1802, from the Manchester Grammar School, and spent a year in North Wales and London, as described in the Confessions. In 1803 he went to Oxford, where he neglected his "schools" and made few acquaintances, but set himself to the study of German, and began to take opium. After leaving the University he took a house in the Lake Country, where he married in 1816. Three years later monetary losses obliged him to accept the post of editor of the Westmoreland Gazette. He soon moved to London, however, and began working for the magazines.

His papers, which touch on an immense variety of subjects, appeared for the most part in The London Magazine, from 1821-1824; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1826-1849; Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, 1834-1852; and Hogg's Instructor, 1851 and 1852. He contributed also to the Encyclopædia Britannica (7th ed. 1827-1842); and published Klosterheim, or The Masque in 1839, and The Logic of Political Economy in 1844.

In 1828 he went to Edinburgh, and after losing his wife, took a cottage at Mavis Bank, Lasswade, for his daughters, and himself lived partly with them and partly in lodgings in the city until his death, 8th August 1859.]

DE QUINCEY, says Prof. Masson, "has taken his place in our literature as the author of about 150 magazine articles," of which the first was written at the comparatively advanced age of thirty-five.

Unpropitious as these conditions may appear, they were nevertheless of material assistance towards the development of his genius. During those thirty and odd years he had observed mankind under a variety of conditions, and gained an unusually wide acquaintance with literature, both classical and modern. His strong memory and historical insight enabled him to use this knowledge as a means of enriching his style; while the necessities of finishing for the press, and satisfying magazine editors, restrained the excess of elaboration and "wire-drawing" to which he was naturally addicted.

"For my own part," he says, "without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been on the whole the life of a philosopher. From my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. . . . I have passed more of my life in absolute and unmitigated solitude, voluntarily and for intellectual purposes, than any person I have ever met with, heard of, or

read of.'

He was before all things a student who, though supremely interested in his fellow-creatures, both individually and in masses, was entirely without a sense of responsibility towards his generation. His writings are pre-eminently exegetical, lacking in the imperative mood. He analyses, interprets, or expounds after his subtle, philosophic, though somewhat eccentric and paradoxical manner; taking nothing for granted, probing into everything he touches, and illuminating it by some flash of originality. Though not always a sound thinker, he marshals his arguments with an orderly precision, which is invaluable in a good cause. Exactness, carried to the verge of pedantry, is the conspicuous merit of his style; which is further strengthened by a scrupulous attention to the conditions of effective comparison, and by the explicitness with which his statements and clauses are connected. Even his grammar and punctuation are singularly clear and careful.

Beneath this vigorous intellectuality lurks a curiously deliberate and “dæmonic” kind of humour, which largely consists in the sudden introduction of an unexpected point of view, the use of dignified language for the discussion of trivialities, and the application of artistic or professional terms to records of crime and passion. On such occasions he may be said to parody his own manner with conspicuous success. Unfortunately he sometimes descends to a style of "button-hole" facetiousness, caught perhaps from his boisterous friend Wilson, which is entirely out of place in his writings, and seems, for the time being, to destroy his usually fine sense of artistic propriety.

Composition, indeed, with De Quincey was in the highest sense of the word an art. He had what he called "an electric aptitude for seizing analogies,” or "a logical instinct for feeling in a moment the secret analogies or parallelisms that connect things else apparently remote," and his erudition furnished a plentiful supply of recondite metaphors, personifications, and figures of speech. His vocabulary was copious, and he had a marked fondness for the Latin portion of it, which assisted his precision, his humour, and the stately rhythm in which he delighted.

His style is essentially decorative, and he aims consciously at sublimity of thought and diction. He does not shrink from daring appeals to the infinite, and risks bewildering his reader by dizzy flights to the uttermost limits of time and space. He builds up his sentences and his paragraphs with a sensitive ear for the music of words. One phrase seems like the echo of another, and even the impression of distance in sound is cunningly produced. His finest passages are distinguished by the crowded richness of fancy, the greater range and arbitrariness of combination, which are the peculiar attributes of poetry.

At times, indeed, he becomes obscure from over-elaboration ; and there can be no doubt that his digressions are too frequent and too lengthy. The tendency towards verbosity, however, is considerably checked by his intellectual alertness, and by his preference for miniatures, narrative and philosophic.

De Quincey of course was not the first writer of "impassioned prose." He shared the reaction of his day against the severer classicism of the eighteenth century, preferring rather the ornate manner of Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, and their contemporaries; and following somewhat closely in the steps of Jean Paul Richter. He claimed only to be the author of a "mode of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that he was aware of in any literature," of which, as Professor Minto has pointed out, "the speciality consists in describing incidents of purely personal interest in language suited to their magnitude as they appear in the eyes of the writer." The splendour of his style prepares the reader to be attracted, and he has moreover the wisdom to avoid comparing his experiences to those of others, or suggesting that they are in themselves extraordinary.

Such are the characteristics of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, by which De Quincey introduced himself to the public, the Suspiria de Profundis, the opium dreams of The English Mail Coach, and many of the "autobiographic sketches." The firstnamed, considered merely as "confessions," are not so remarkable as those, for instance, of Rousseau. The story is comparatively commonplace, the attitude is less morbidly frank, and the author is in no sense the emotional mouthpiece of his generation.

While writing of himself, he naturally spoke also of his friends and contemporaries, and the frankness with which he did so has earned for him the reputation of spitefulness. But he lived so entirely out of the world, that he probably did not