thing approaching to an adequate conception of his genius, even though acquainted with the 'Confessions,' until we found access to certain of his papers, published long ago, and since hidden from the general gaze in 'that vast abyss' which, to use his own words, 'has, like the sea, swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up again.' His analytic powers were comparatively a secret to us until we read his 'Templars' Dialogues,' which indicate to us more strikingly than even his large work on political economy-in which, indeed, we made but slight progress-a clear, farseeing intellect; and we had no idea, even after reading his 'Confessions,' that there had ever existed an Englishman who could have written 'The Vision of Sudden Death,' and the 'Dream Fugue' founded thereon. It is well the divingbell is at work in the bringing up of those and other treasures.* If readers judge our estimate of De Quincey anywise too high, we bid them wait. Let them, besides, consider that we take into account, in judging of the powers of De Quincey, the fact that his life has been shadowed by one great cloud, which would have fatally obscured any ordinary intellect, that he has seen the stars through a veil, and that we have to mete the power of that vision which could pierce such an obstruction. Once more, let it be remembered that the mind of De Quincey must, on all hands, be allowed to be one of a very singular and original kind. It is prominently characterised by two qualities, which are partially regarded with suspicion by hard thinkers, and tend to lower the expectation of the reader who is in search of substantial intellectual sustenance: we mean humour, and what we can only call mysticism. De Quincey is essentially and always a humorist; a humorist of a very rare and delicate order, but whose very delicacy is mistaken by hard minds for feebleness or silly trifling. He is also, to some extent, an intellectual mystic. We use this word in no disparaging sense; nor do we lay emphasis upon the fact, that he has devoted years *We need scarcely remind our readers that the publisher of the INSTRUCTOR is bringing out at present a beautiful edition of the works of De Quincey, entitled 'Selections Grave and Gay, from the Writings, Published and Unpublished, of Thomas De Quincey. Revised and enlarged by himself.' The third volume has just appeared.

of study to the works of express mystics. We indeed think that this last is not of material importance in estimating his writings; the influence of these writers was not, it appears to us, of sufficient power materially to colour his originality. By the quality of mysticism, as attaching to the mind of De Quincey, we mean rather a certain affinity, so to speak, for the mysterious, a strange idiosyncrasy, in which associations of terror, of gladness, or of gloom, link themselves with certain seasons and places. Voices of sympathy awaken for him, where no sound falls on the general ear; sorrows, from which the common mail of custom and coarseness, or even active practical occupation, defends other men, affect him with poignant anguish; and joys which are far too delicate and aerial to approach the hard man of the world, float over his soul like spiritual music; he has a sure footing in dim and distant regions, where phantasy piles her towers, and raises her colonnades, and wraps all in her wierd and wondrous drapery. He tells us that, 'like Sir Thomas Brown, his mind almost demanded mysteries in so mysterious a system of relations as those which connect us with another world;' and we cannot hesitate to use the hint for the explication of much to which he does not, in that connection, intend it to apply. I know we are met by expressions of sentiment, regarding summer, and death, and solitude, which may appear strange or far-fetched, and we are told of woes which our duller imaginations and less tremulous sympathies almost compel us to deem fantastic. Altogether, to the matter-of-fact English reader, the phenomena presented by these works are astonishing and alarming; and it is well for him, if his hasty practicality does not prompt him to close them at once, deciding that there is no real metal for life's highway to be found there, but only such airy materials as might be used by some Macadam of the clouds. Now, we are confident that De Quincey has performed intellectual service for the age, which could be shown to be practically substantial to the most rigorously practical mind; but we would specially urge, that it is quite possible that writings may be of the highest value, although one cannot trace their association with any We department of economic affairs. are practical enough, and make no pretension to having wings for the

ether.' But let it at once be said, that the world is not a manufactory. There are regions where the spirit of man can expatiate above the corn-field or the counter; it is lawful for the immortal principle within us to rise for a time out of the atmosphere of the labour curse; the universe is really wonderful, and it is not well to forget the fact; nay, finally, it is well for a man, perhaps at times it is best for him, to spread the wings of his mind for regions positively removed from, antipodal to, practice, if haply he may gain glimpses of habitations higher than earth, and destinies nobler than those of time. Bold as the assertion looks, we should question the power of any man to be a docile and accurate disciple of the Comte school of philosophy, who found the highest enjoyment of understanding and sympathy in the works of De Quincey!

When, beneath all its drapery of cloud and rainbow, the grand physiognomic outlines of De Quincey's mind reveal themselves to the reader, his primary observation will probably be, that it is marked by an extraordinary analytic faculty. De Quincey's own opinion declares this to be the principal power in his mind; and though we should not deem this in itself conclusive, we cannot but think it strongly confirmatory of the general evidence gathered from other quarters. 'My proper vocation,' these are his words, 'as I well knew, was the exercise of the analytic understanding.' The more we know of De Quincey's writings, the more are we driven to the conviction, that his mind is, in this regard, of an extremely high order. His intensely clear perception of the relation between ideas, the delight with which he expatiates in regions of pure abstraction, where no light lives but that of the 'inevitable eye' of the mind, the ease with which he unravels and winds off what appears a mere skein of cloudstreamers, too closely blended to be taken apart, and too delicate not to rend asunder, afford irresistible evidence of rare analytic power. That our words may be seen to be no mere rhetorical painting of our own fancies, but a feeble attempt to indicate what our eyes have seen, we shall glance cursorily at one or two of those portions of De Quincey's works which give attestation of this power.

The science of political economy is remarkable as one of those in which the abstract and the concrete are seen most

clearly in their mutual relations. Beginning with mere abstractions, or what appear such, with factors which must be dealt with algebraically, and seem absolutely independent of practice, it proceeds onwards until it embraces every complexity of our social existence, until every mathematical line is turned into an actual visible extension, and every ideal form has to take what shape it can amid the jostling and scrambling of life. It is thus, in our opinion, perhaps the very best study in which a man can engage for the culture of his argumentative nature. For, as we say, it has every stage: it demands mathematical accuracy in one part, and lays down rigidly the ideal law; it brings you on till you are in the field and workshop, till you have to calculate the strength of varied desires, the probable upshot of complicated chances, the modifications produced by a thousand nameless influences. From the mathematical diagram to the table of statistics, from the academy to the street, from the closet of the philosopher to the world of the statesman, political economy conducts the student. Whatever the practical value of the science to the merchant, legislator, moralist, or philanthropist and we have no leisure to demonstrate, as we think is possible, its practical value to each-it scarcely admits of a doubt, that, as an instrument of mental culture, it is invaluable.

But this remark is incidental: we have glanced at the general nature of the science of political economy, in order that we may exhibit clearly the particular department in which De Quincey is distinguished. This, of course, is the abstract portion. The fundamental laws of the science, or rather the one fundamental law on which it is all built, furnished his mind with occupation. This one fundamental law is the law of value. It determines what is, viewed abstractly, the grand cause which fixes the relative value of articles-how much of any one will exchange for so much of any other. Once this is found, you know whence all deviations depart, you know how each modifying element will act, you havé, so to speak, formed your theory of the seasons, although you cannot tell what showers may fall, what winds may blow, what ripening weeks of sunshine may usher in the harvest. 'He,' says De Quincey, 'who is fully master of the subject of value, is already a good political economist.' We perfectly agree with him, and

think that political economy first and for ever became an established science, when the theory of value was perfected. The honour of having published the demonstration belongs to David Ricardo; but De Quincey, as has so often happened, found himself anticipated with the public, for he had arrived at the same results: as it was, little remained for him to do, but to silence a few objectors who long continued to oppose Ricardo. This he did in the 'Dialogues' to which we have referred, in a manner so clear and conclusive, that assent may be said to have become synonymous with comprehension. It is difficult to convey any idea of these papers to one who has not read them. To quote any passage were an improvement upon the brick sample of the house, for it would be to offer a stone as sample of an arch; to abridge is out of the question, for they are a model of terseness. Considered as pieces of reasoning, they are really masterly. There is an artistic perfection about them. The beauty of precision, of clearness, of absolute performance of the thing required, is the only beauty admissible. Accordingly, there is not an illustration which is not there simply because it speaks more clearly than words; there are no flourishes of rhetoric: all is quiet, orderly, conclusive, like the British line advancing to the charge, and with the same result. It is true that, even in them, De Quincey could not be dull, and so there is the slightest infusion of humour, which adds a raciness to the whole, and is thus promotive of the general effect. Mr M'Culloch, a man not given to enthusiasm, says of these papers, that they ‘are unequalled, perhaps, for brevity, pungency, and force.

De Quincey's introduction to political economy was characteristic, and illustrates remarkably the nature of his powers. He took to it as an amusement, when debility had caused the cessation of severer studies. About the year 1811, he became acquainted with a great many books and pamphlets on the subject; but it seems that what had employed the concentrated, protracted, and healthful energies of men for about a couple of centuries, could not for a moment bide the scrutiny of his languishing eye. Thus politely and composedly does he indicate his general impression of what books, pamphlets, speeches, and other compositions bearing on political economy had come in his way:-'I saw that these were generally the very dregs

and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus heads to powder with a lady's fan.' Such sudden and amazing proficiency, we presume, scientific professors would not extremely desire. However, this surprising pupil was soon to meet the master:At length,' he proceeds, 'in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr Ricardo's book; and, recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, "Thou art the man!" Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself, that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading; and, much more, I wondered at the book. Had this profound book been really written in England during the nineteenth century?

Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial* cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and a century of thought, had failed to advance even by one hair'sbreadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr Ricardo had deduced à priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.'

Are our readers acquainted with the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,' by David Ricardo? If not, they will hardly appreciate De Quincey's enthusiasm, or understand what it implies. Butler and Edwards are by no means drawing-room authors, yet the perusal of their works seems to us to approach the nature of an intellectual recreation, compared with that of this book of Ricardo's. We consider it that volume which, of all we know, requires the highest tension and effort of intellect. It has a thousand times been charged with obscurity, and a

*'Senatorial:'-This is a mistake. Ricardo entered the House of Commons in 1819; his work was published in 1817.

filmy subtlety of speculation; yet its difficulty consists principally in that it is the production of a mind so exceedingly clear, that it could completely master and fully embrace a subject, by seeing its great leading points of illumination, without tracing the path from the one to the other. Thus the reader is, as it were, carried from eminence to eminence by the writer, without being shown the way he travels; and having reached each, not by the usual step-by-step method, he is moved to question the reality of his progress, and to object to the extraordinary new method of instruction, in which he must ever and anon commit himself to the strong arm or wing of the preceptor, to be carried to a higher station. He feels that too large a demand is made on his faith; he wishes to walk a little by sight. Ricardo coolly sets him down, with the assurance that his progress has been real, and that now he stands on a higher platform than he ever occupied before, but with the declaration, that he must find some other to explain pedagogically the mode of advancement, since there are further heights to which his guide must forthwith ascend. Now De Quincey had the supreme satisfaction of going side by side with Ricardo in his aerial voyagings; he knew well whither he was going, and the absolute certainty that it was onwards; he could look down, with a satisfied, half-sneering smile, upon the strugglers below, who jogged honestly but slowly along, proclaiming their distrust in all aerial carriages. In those 'Templars' Dialogues,' he just seems to us to be sitting in the chariot with Ricardo, laughing at Malthus and other disbelievers, and calling them to look up, and see that all their difficulty of apprehension lies in the fact, that the one path is through the air, and straight as an arrow's flight, while the other is along the ground, amid sand heaps and tangled jungles. De Quincey himself has admirably described the nature of Ricardo's obscurity, by saying that, if it can be fairly alleged against him at all, it can arise only from 'too keen a perception of the truth, which may have seduced him at times into too elliptic a development of his opinions, and made him impatient of the tardy and continuous steps which are best adapted to the purposes of the teacher. For,' he adds,the fact is, that the labourers of the Mine (as I am accustomed to call them), or (those who dig up the metal of truth, are seldom fitted to

be also labourers of the Mint—i. e., to work up the metal for current use.' 'Seed corn,' says Goethe, 'should not be ground.' Such were the difficulty and the obscurity of Ricardo. Now, we certainly should found no claim to an extraordinary analytic faculty, on the mere power to comprehend any author; but the fact of keen enjoyment, of free exulting pleasure being derived from the perusal of a book, is always conclusive proof of an affinity with the powers it exhibits; and the instant recognition with which De Quincey welcomed Ricardo's discoveries, as well as the perfect comprehension, nay, light and graceful, and absolutely commanding mastery with which he ever after used and expounded these, may be regarded, even independently of his own words, as sufficient evidence that he himself had trodden the same high path, and that, as has often been the case, the same laws unfolded themselves, almost contemporaneously, to the analytic intellects of De Quincey and Ricardo. We claim not for the former any honour which the succession of the years denied him: but when the question is not of the honour of a discovery, but the possession of a faculty, the above argument is irresistible. We think, therefore, that, in the mere power of analysis, leaving all else out of account, an equality may be vindicated for De Quincey with the great legislator in political economy. More than this we do not claim: but no one who has any acquaintance with the works of Ricardo, will require a further proof that the English Opium-eater is a writer whose works deserve earnest study from all who love clear and far-seeing thought.

Leaving political economy, and entering the wider field of history, professing also no longer to abide with psychological correctness by the faculty of analysis, but seeking the traces of general power and clearness of intellect, we would advance the general proposition, that De Quincey has looked over the course of humanity with such a searching, philosophic glance, that, desultory though his teaching has been, he has discerned and embodied in his works certain truths of the last importance. They are of that sort which may be called illuminative: they are rays of light which go along the whole course of time, revealing and harmonising: their value can be fully appreciated only when one traverses history, carrying them as lamps in his hand, and observing

how, in their light, the confused becomes orderly, the dark becomes bright.

We cannot find a better instance than in his ideas regarding war. These furnish, indeed, a remarkable case, and that with which we have been most struck: we think it of itself sufficient to justify what we have above advanced. We had long been of opinion that the ideas regarding war, which not only floated in the public mind, but found countenance from men of high and unquestionable powers, were singularly superficial and unsound: from Foster and Carlyle to John Bright, we heard no word on the subject with which we could agree. It was the first general glance, and that alone, which was taken; the observations on which the arguments were based, were such as every child must again and again have made that war was accompanied with great effusion of blood, that in its scowl the face of the world gathered blackness as of death, that there was not enmity or personal quarrel between the individual combatants, and the like. Foster we found unable to thrill to the ardours of the 'Iliad,' or, if he did experience a rising sense of its glories, we saw him shrinking, as if from guilt, and likening it to a beautiful but deadly knife: Carlyle, with a satire whose intense cleverness made cool examination of the philosophic value of his words almost impossible, resolved our late wars into the aimless volleys by which the peaceful inhabitants of two far-separated French and English villages of 'Dumb-drudge' exterminated each other. We found no clear conception of the function, in the evolution of human civilisation, of agencies in themselves calamitous: we found no philosophic conception of war in its real nature, as the most direful yet indispensable effect of reason acting under the curse of labour and the obscuration of sin-the sublimely fearful yet necessary lightning, which has flashed in the night of human history. We had indicated our opinions on this matter in these very pages (in a paper on Wellington), but were unaware that we were not alone, when we happened to fall in with an article by De Quincey, in which he treated of war. A glance was sufficient. We had cause of pride, but also of humiliation. We agreed with every word. The germs of a whole philosophy of war were before us, every lingering doubt was dissipated. And it was a consoling assu

rance that our views were not, as they looked, peculiarly savage, to find that De Quincey, whose womanly tenderness is, to our knowledge, unexampled in literature, yet sympathised, with calmest deliberation and profound intensity, in those feelings to which men have ever attached sublimity, from the shouts of Marathon to the thunders of Trafalgar. But how could we ever have imagined a linguistic garb like that in which we now saw our notions arrayed! How perfect was the mastery with which the whole was grasped! He played with his · subject: he touched it as he pleased with his magician wand, and it took what colours he chose. Whatever of dimness had attached to our ideas, was dissipated as mist by sunlight: all was boldly, clearly, definitely evolved. The thoughts which we had clothed in the homespun of prose, and it might be with a want of analytic clearness, now leaped forth in the mail of logic, and the plumes of poetry. We were proud that we had agreed with De Quincey; we were, with a somewhat different feeling, impressed by the incommensurable distance which there may be between two expositions of an idea in the English tongue.

This whole paper on war we would cite as singularly characteristic of De Quincey. Here, most emphatically, is there attested the danger of trusting to first appearances and impressions. Philosophy and fun do so intermingle their parts, that one is astonished and startled. Now all seems mirth and jollity; the writer is intent on proving that the ancients pilfered jokes on a large scale from the moderns; that it must have been the former and not the latter, is plain, from the fact, that those were

heathens, infidels, pagan dogs.' Then you have a long detail respecting a fund which is to be commenced by a halfcrown legacy of De Quincey's, and which is to be put into requisition, when the Peace Congress has prevailed, and war vanishes from human history. The fund may accumulate at any interest: ere required, it will, under any circumstances, have reached to the moon; therefore the man in the moon is named a trustee. The destination of the fund is the support of all those to be put out of employment when armies and fleets are disbanded, and the trustees are most eloquently and earnestly charged to deal