dances a useful one. People will dance, and we believe that dancing might be made a higher and more estimable pleasure than it is in these polking, whirling days; Sir John Davies' Orchestra' elevates the performance into a high rank among supersensual things; it is therefore that in these serious pages we venture on a long and characteristic extract.

'The invitation was, of course, on my friend's account; but her majesty had condescended to direct that I, as his visitor, should be specially included. Lord Westport, young as he was, had become tolerably indifferent about such things; but to me such a scene was a novelty; and, on that account, it was settled we should go as early as was permissible. We did go: and I was not sorry to have had the gratification of witnessing (if it were but for once or twice) the splendours of a royal party. But, after the first edge of expectation was taken off, after the vague uncertainties of rustic ignorance had given place to absolute realities, and the eye had become a little familiar with the flashing of the jewellery, I began to suffer under the constraints incident to a young person in such a situation-the situation, namely, of sedentary passiveness, where one is acted upon, but does not act. The music, in fact, was all that continued to delight me; and, but for that, I believe, I should have had some difficulty in avoiding so monstrous an indecorum as yawning. I revise this faulty expression, however, on the spot: not the music only it was, but the music combined with the dancing, that so deeply impressed me. The ball-room-a temporary erection, with something of the character of a pavilion about it-wore an elegant and festal air; the part allotted to the dancers being fenced off by a gilded lattice-work, and ornamented beautifully from the upper part with drooping festoons of flowers. But all the luxury that spoke to the eye merely, faded at once by the side of impassioned dancing, sustained by impassioned music. Of all the scenes which this world offers, none is to me so profoundly interesting, none (I say it deliberately) so affecting, as the spectacle of men and women floating through the mazes of a dance; under these conditions, however, that the music shall be rich, resonant, and festal, the execution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous motion. But this last condition will be sought vainly in the quadrilles, &c., which have for so many years banished the truly beautiful country-dances native to England. Those whose taste and sensibility were so defective as to substitute for the beautiful in dancing the merely difficult, were sure, in the end, to transfer the depravations of this art from the opera-house to the floors of private ball-rooms. The tendencies even then were in that direction; but as yet they had not attained their final stage: and the English country-dance was still in estimation at the courts of princes. Now, of all dances, this is the only one, as a class, of which you can truly describe the motion to be continuous, that is, not interrupted or fitful, but unfolding its fine mazes with the equability of light in its diffusion through free space. And wherever the music happens to be not of a light, trivial character, but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, and the performers in the dance so far skilful as to betray no awkwardness verging on the ludicrous, I believe that many people feel as I feel in such circumstances, viz. derive from the spectacle the very grandest form of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatsoever. Sadness is not the exact word; nor is there any word in any language (because none in the finest languages) which exactly expresses the state; since it is not a depressing, but a most elevating state to which I allude.'

*

From all which the reader may comprehend, if he should not happen experimentally to have felt, that a spectacle of young men and women, flowing through the mazes of an intricate dance under a full volume of music, taken with all the circumstantial adjuncts of such a scene in rich men's halls; the blaze of lights and jewels, the life, the motion, the sealike undulation of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the ȧvakúkλwσis or self-revolving, both of the dance and the music, "never ending, still beginning," and the continual regeneration of order from a system of motions which for ever touch the very brink of confusion; that such a spectacle, with such circumstances, may happen to be capable of exciting and sustaining the very grandest emotions of philosophic melancholy to which the human spirit is open. The reason is, in part, that such a scene presents a sort of mask of human life, with its whole equipage of pomps and glories, its luxury of sight and sound, its hours of golden youth, and the interminable revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation treading upon the flying footsteps of another; whilst all the while the overruling music attempers the mind to the spectacle, the subject to the object, the beholder to the vision.'—Vol. i. pp. 205, 206.

A chapter headed, 'The Nation of London,' is a curious specimen of our author's powers of digression. All people of any literary name are expected, if they see London for the first time after they have reached a thinking age, to have something pointed and emphatic to say about it. It must have been on this principle that Mr. De Quincey undertook his task of recording his first impressions; but finding that his impressions of London were really nothing at all-that in fact there was no opportunity of forming any -he uses the occasion for an indulgence in absolute discursiveness, not without passages of deep thought, nor unamusing as a specimen of our author's manner, so soon as we find that nothing is to be learnt on the subject proposed. Forty closely printed pages are spent on this nominal topic; the first, legitimately enough, on describing the roads and the traffic which lead up to this great centre; only these the boys did not see,-as, to avoid dust, they posted in bye-ways. However, they got into the Edgewareroad, and were locked once or twice in a stream of carriages. What had they come for?' he asks; to see London?' But for this task only three hours and a-half were allowed, as they had appointed to dine at Porters, the seat of Lord Westport's grandfather, that same evening. Here then is a tangent from which to fly off. The proportion of time to the things to be seen within that time, is suggestive of disproportions generally. Three times, our author tells us, he had had his taste, i.e. his sense of proportions, memorably outraged. It is of course in keeping with a mind like his, that these similar outrages should have as little relation as possible in all common judgments with the disproportion under question. The first instance, then, is when he saw a painting of Cape Horn, which seemed almost 'treasonably below its rank and office in this world-as the ter'minal abutment of our mightiest continent. How ashamed we

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should be if that Cape should ever be seen from the moon.' At this sally he glances off to relate how a party of Englishmen, ascending Mount Etna to see the sun rise, were so disgusted at the failure of splendour in this luminary, that they unanimously hissed him-with apologetic explanations from our author excusing the sun for his shortcomings. The next example is the final ceremonial valediction of Garrick from his stage, wherein professing to take leave of the world, he could only say farewell to an audience the author branching off here into comparisons of the size of Drury Lane and the Circus Maximus. The last disproportion is this necessity of seeing London in three hours. The boys very sensibly decide upon either S. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, to be seen as a representative of London, and to determine the doubtful point, they toss up. Heads come up for the Abbey, but as each proves to have a preference for the other, they try again, and then heads were the Cathedral. But here that one touch of nature which makes the whole world

kin occurs. The fees naturally offended these young sightseers: they were disgusted by applications for twopences. The subject is suggestive, and we say farewell to S. Paul's: for fees at churches and public buildings remind the author of other restrictions, more oppressive than fees, in public libraries, and these occupy three pages, enriched by a long note on the subject of copyright. It is time now to leave London, if their dinner appointment is to be kept. They arrive in time, and meet at dinner a Lord Morton, who had once been engaged to a lady who had had an extraordinary presentiment of her premature death; and the story is told at length. This Lord Morton distinguished our author by particular compliments on a certain prize copy of Latin verses, which had taken the third place, and was deserving in his lordship's opinion of the first. This kindness is acknowledged at great length, going into the question of the author's amount of value for intellectual distinction, and his just opinion, that with his degree of talent, he might have made a poet for his own day, but not the more genuine poet of all time; with some very just remarks on poetry in general. They return now to Eton, and attend the Royal ball, of which we have already given the description in part. It ends by a long digressive facetious account of the schoolboy language Ziph,' in which he and his companion conversed on this occasion, tracing it up to Nineveh, and involving an anecdote of fagging at Winchester, in which some boys were nightly compelled to traverse the sewers of that ancient city, to the injury of their health. Soon after the young travellers left Eton for Ireland, passing through Wales, the scenery of which is criticised with considerable discernment. There their tutor suddenly left them, under some unexplained pique. This, as a mystery, reminds Mr. De Quincey of other mysteries totally

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irrelevant, of which he gives the history with comments and moral. Next the voyage is described, and at length they arrive at Dublin. This resumé, under the head of seeing 'London,' is given as a specimen of the intellectual effort exacted very frequently from Mr. De Quincey's readers. They can never be sure of their ground, nor can hope for a moment's repose on any one subject. The consequences on the attention are often fatal. The faculty of wandering is one very easily imparted by a writer to his readers, only we find ourselves preferring our own wanderings to our author's-and fairly come to a stand, though we are willing to acknowledge that he has a good deal to say that we should be glad to read, if only it could be set forth with something like method, not in a disorder which quite damps and palls the intellectual appetite. Yet this is a vain wish-a prosy discursive habit of mind, has a deeper root of evil than mere want of method. There is too often a love of display in it, a small vanity for parading stores of knowledge and memory, which deprives the mind of vigour and power to pursue a train of connected thought. One thing, such writers and talkers seem to have more at heart than the elucidation of their subject, and that is the exhibition of themselves. Yet these sound harsh judgments, when we find our author conscious of his own habit of mind, as in the following passage:—

My last two chapters, very slenderly connected with Birmingham, are yet made to rise out of it; the one out of Birmingham's own relation to the topic concerned (viz. Travelling), and the other (viz. my Brother) out of its relation to all possible times in my earlier life, and therefore, why not to all possible places? Anywhere introduced, the chapter was partially out of its place; as well then to introduce it in Birmingham as elsewhere. Somewhat arbitrary episodes, therefore, are these two last chapters; yet still endurable as occurring in a work confessedly rambling, and whose very duty lies in the pleasant paths of vagrancy. Pretending only to amuse my reader, or pretending chiefly to that, however much I may have sought, or shall seck, to interest him occasionally through his profounder affections, I enjoy a privilege of neglecting harsher logic, and connecting the separate sections of these sketches, not by ropes and cables, but by threads of aërial gossamer.'—Vol. i. p. 350.

It is a mistake at any rate, if nothing worse, to suppose this deliberate habit of digression agreeable. The English mind is impatient at anything so unbusiness-like. We do not wonder, therefore, to find that Mr. De Quincey refers to America as the country to which he looks for sympathy, and which first appreciated, and called for a collection and reprint of his scattered papers. So frightful a prolixity penetrates and pervades the literature of that country, so audacious are the claims of its authors upon the time and attention of their readers, that by comparison Mr. De Quincey might seem reasonable in his demands. Practice may have made American readers so skilful in gathering the precious ore of thought from out of the débris amongst

which it lies scattered, that they may have become unconscious of the labour. Certain it is that our author's preface alludes to much flattering comment and criticism reaching him, through private means, from his transatlantic readers.

It might have been well to introduce earlier some dates into our sketch. They occur but seldom in the book itself; but we gather that our author was born about the year 1786; that his visit to Dublin took place in 1800, two years after the rebellion, of which he gives the history at length-as he heard it constantly described in general society there; that thirty-three years after this time the majority of these papers were written; and added to subsequently, first for the American edition, published probably in 1848, and finally for the present republication; at which time we conclude the author to be approaching his seventieth year. The English Opium Eater' appeared in the 'London Magazine' in 1821, before these wandering habits had gained their present mastery.

But to return now from the author, with his mature faults, to the gifted boy of fourteen or fifteen. No longer, however, a boy at that age, but prematurely a man: as he himself explains, on the occasion of the first dawn of love and reverence for the gentler sex first irradiating his mind. The history of this event is curious, as showing the morbid condition of a mind so unfortunately in advance of its age, and probably subject to an acute dread of ridicule. The scene is the deck of an Irish passageboat, on which he and his young friend were returning from a visit to some noble family at a distance from Dublin. On board was a lady (with her family of daughters), described as an awful personage, a wit, a blue-stocking, a leader of ton in Dublin. Attracted by the intelligence that a young lord was on deck, she left her retirement in the cabin; and ascertaining from the French valet the title and condition of the two young travellers, she applied herself sedulously to flatter the lord, and to humble his companion, whom she chose to regard as a toad-eater. All this sounds improbable enough, but certain it is that the youth so took it, and struggled in vain against the fire of her wit and sarcasm, magnifying the incident into one of the turning points of his life.

"The narrow bounds of our deck made it not easy to get beyond talkingrange; and thus it happened, that for two hours I stood the worst of this bright lady's feud. At length the tables turned. Two ladies appeared slowly ascending from the cabin, both in deepest mourning, but else as different in aspect as summer and winter. The elder was the Countess of Errol, then mourning an affliction which had laid her life desolate, and admitted of no human consolation.'

The younger lady, on the other hand, who was Lady Errol's sister, Heavens! what a spirit of joy and festal pleasure radiated from her eyes, her step, her voice, her manner! She was Irish, and the very impersona