we must keep him; he is, so to speak, married to us. Get up!" he cried, and drove at a trot, through Gurlitz; and Bräsig fell into deep thought. How strangely things went in the world! Such a fellow, who had such a reputation, was yet in circumstances to ruin an honest man's good name; for he was quite certain that Pomuchelskopp was at the bottom of all the stories, and that he had taken pains to set them in circulation was evident from Gustaving's share in the matter.

"It is scandalous," he said to himself, as he got down, in Rahnstadt, at the Frau Pastorin's," but take care, Zamel! I have taken one trick from you, with the pastor's acre, I shall get another; but first I must complain of you, about the 'crow!'"

call a public meeting of the inhabitants to sign a protest against being handed over to Prussia, which was to go forward by the next mail. By this time the anxiety of the Pondicherrians will be relieved, but on the occasion of the next war they will do well to keep themselves as much out of sight as possible. The Madras Mail, speaking on the assumption that the rumour of the cession of Pondicherry was correct, says that had the inhabitants remained perfectly quiet during the war, their existence might have been ignored as heretofore, but having set about buying up all the coal in India and making a fuss about their insignificant fortifications, they attracted the attention of the voracious Chancellor, who determined to gobble up the settlement. Little people can commit no greater mistake than to make themselves conspicuous in times of general disturbance. Pondicherry has this time been only talked about, but its narrow escape should make it more cautious in future, or one of these days it will be annexed to a certainty.

Ir the day ever comes when France finds her- | has shown great good feeling. We learn by the self really able and willing to "cultivate the Madras mail that when the telegram arrived anarts of peace "she will do well to direct her at-nouncing that Count Bismarck had asked for tention to colonization. She has somehow so the cession of Pondicherry, great consternation mismanaged matters that although favoured prevailed in the place. A messenger was sent with many chances, she has never yet succeeded to the Governor at Le Grand Etang, who immein establishing herself comfortably on any of the | diately came into town, and summoned a council territories that have at different times come into of the authorities, at which it was decided to her possession. Chateaubriand in his "Travels in America" calls attention to this weakness. "We possessed here," he says, "vast territories which might have offered a home to the excess of our population, an important market to our commerce, a nursery to our navy. Now we are forced to confine in our prisons culprits condemned by the tribunals for want of a spot of ground on which to place these wretched creatures. We are excluded from the New World where the human race is recommencing. The English and Spanish language serves to express the thoughts of many millions of men in Africa, in Asia, in the South Sea Islands, on the continent of the two Americas; and we, disinherited of the conquests of our courage and our genius, hear the language of Racine, of Colbert, and of Louis XIV. spoken merely in a few hamlets of Louisiana and Canada, under a foreign sway. There it remains, as it were, for an evidence of the reverses of our fortune and the errors of our policy. Thus, then, has France disappeared from North America like those Indian tribes with which she sympathized, and some of the wrecks of which I myself beheld." It is melancholy to observe that although one or two neighbours step in with a few cheering words to console France in her present troubles, she has no grown-up children to weep for and sympathize with their mother. Algeria may shed a few crocodile tears, but not of a nature to bring much consolation. It is only just, however, to Pondicherry to observe that for a small town it

Pall Mall Gazette.

THE famous Bishop Burnet, like many authors of later days, was very partial to tobacco, and always smoked while he was writing. In order to combine the two operations with due comfort to himself, he would bore a hole through the broad brim of his large hat, and putting his long pipe through it, puffed and wrote, and wrote and puffed, with philosophical calmness.

From The Fornightly Review.
DE QUINCEY.

BY LESLIE STEPHEN.

Itering habit by vigorous efforts; as he also tells us that opium is a cure for most grievous evils, and especially saved him from an early death by consumption. It is plain enough, however, that he never really refrained for any length of time; and perhaps we should congratulate ourselves on a propensity, unfortunate, it may be, for its victim, but leading to the Confessions as one collateral result.

LITTLE more than eleven years ago there passed from among us a man who held a high and very peculiar position in English literature. For seventy-three years De Quincey had been carrying on an operation, which, for want of a better term, we must describe as living, but which would be more fitly described by some mode of The only fact of De Quincey's career, in speech indicating an existence on the con- which we may conceive ourselves to be fines of dreamland and reality. In 1821 he treading the firm ground of fact, is the first published the work with which his early period described in his various autoname is most commonly associated, and at biographical writings. If we could evapuncertain intervals he gave tokens to man-orate the gorgeous rhetoric and the diffuse kind of his continued presence on earth. discussions of irrelevant topics, of which What his life may have been in the inter- they are chiefly composed, we might pervals seems to have been unknown even to haps come upon a residuum of solid dates his friends. He began by disappearing and facts. Setting aside, however, the from school and from his family, and seems difficulty of discriminating the facts from to have fallen into the habit of temporary fancies, we should not learn much that is eclipses. At one moment he dropped upon of importance. That he was the son of a his acquaintance from the clouds; at an- rich merchant, who left him an orphan at other he would vanish into utter darkness an early age; that he lived in a suburb now for weeks or months together. One day swallowed up by the advance of Mancheshe came to dine with Christopher North, ter; that he was sent to school, and proved -so we are told in the professor's life, so bright that he became a prodigy of was detained for the night by a heavy Greek scholarship; that he quarrelled with storm of rain, and prolonged his impromptu his guardians, ran away to Wales, and afvisit for a year. During that period his terwards led for a time a strange, incoghabits must have been rather amazing to a nate existence amongst outcasts and thievwell-regulated household. His wants, in-ish attorneys in London, is pretty well all deed, were simple, and, in one sense, regular; a particular joint of mutton, cut according to a certain mathematical formula, and an ounce of laudanum made him happy for a day. But in the hours when ordinary beings are awake, he was generally to be found stretched in profound opium-slumbers upon a rug before the fire, and it was only about two or three in the morning that he gave unequivocal symptoms of vitality, and suddenly gushed forth in streams of wondrous eloquence to the supper parties detained for the purpose of witnessing the display. That is the most distinct glimpse I have caught of the living De Quincey. Between these irregular apparitions we are lastly given to understand that his life was so strange that its details would be incredible. What these incredible details may have been, I have no means of knowing. It is enough that he was a strange, unsubstantial being, flitting uncertainly about in the twilight regions of society, emerging by fits and starts into visibility, afflicted with a general vagueness, as to the ordinary duties of mankind, and always and everywhere taking much more opium than was good for him. He tells us, indeed, that he broke off his overmas

that we are told. From other sources, it seems that he ought to have taken a brilliant degree at Oxford in the same year with Sir Robert Peel, but that he decamped in a sudden panic before the end of the examination. It is plain enough that before his opium excesses he was the victim of a morbid temperament, and little calculated to struggle with the prosaic hardships of life. He gives thanks himself for four circumstances. He rejoices that his lot was cast in a rustic solitude; that that solitude was in England; that his "infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters,' instead of "horrid pugilistic brothers;" and that he and his were members of "a pure, holy, and" (the last epithet should be emphasized) "magnificent Church." The thanksgiving is characteristic, for it indicates his naïve conviction that his admiration was due to the intrinsic merits of the place and circumstances of his birth, and not to the accident that they were his own. It would be useless to inquire whether a more bracing atmosphere and a less retired spot might have been more favourable to his talents; but we may trace the influence of these conditions of his early life upon his subsequent career.

The

De Quincey implicitly puts forward a passioned prose, and, finally, as applying claim which has been accepted by many impassioned prose to confessions. competent critics. They declare, and he first question suggested by this assertion tacitly assumes, that he is a master of the concerns the sense of the word "impasEnglish language. He claims a sort of in- sioned." There is very little of what one fallibility in deciding upon the precise use ordinarily means by passion in the Confesof words and the merits of various styles. sions or elsewhere. There are no exploBut he explicitly claims something more. sions of political wrath, such as animate He declares that he has used language for the Letters on a Regicide Peace, or of a purposes to which it has hardly been ap- deep religious emotion, which breathes plied by any prose writers. The Confes-through many of our greatest prose-writers. sions of an Opium-eater and the Suspiria The language is undoubtedly a vehicle for de Profundis are, he tells us, "modes of sentiments of a certain kind, but hardly of impassioned prose, ranging under no prece- that burning and impetuous order which dents that I am aware of in any literature." we generally indicate by impassioned. It The only confessions that have previously is deep, melancholy reverie, not concentratmade any great impression upon the world are those of St. Augustine and of Rousseau; but, with one short exception in St. Augustine, neither of those compositions contains any passion, and, therefore, De Quincey stands absolutely alone as the inventor and sole performer on a new musical instrument for such an instrument is the English language in his hands. He belongs to a genus in which he is the only individual. The novelty and the difficulty of the task must be his apology if he fails, and causes of additional glory if he succeeds. He alone of all human beings who have stained paper since the world began, has entered a path, which the absence of rivals proves to be encumbered with some unusual obstacles. The accuracy and value of so bold a claim require a short examination. After all, every writer, however obscure, may contrive by a judicious definition to put himself into a solitary class. He has some peculiarities which distinguish him from all other mortals. He is the only journalist who writes at a given epoch from a particular garret in Grub Street, or the only poet who is exactly six feet high and measures precisely forty-two inches round the chest. Any difference whatever may be applied to purposes of classification, and the question is whether the difference is, or is not, of much importance. By examining, therefore, the propriety of De Quincey's view of his own place in literature, we shall be naturally led to some valuation of his distinctive merits. In deciding whether a bat should be classed with birds or beasts, we have to determine the nature of the beast and the true theory of his wings. And De Quincey, if the comparison be not too quaint, is like the bat, an ambiguous character, rising on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetical region.

ed essence of emotion; and the epithet fails to indicate any specific difference between himself and many other writers. The real peculiarity is not in the passion expressed, but in the mode of expressing it. De Quincey resembles the story-tellers mentioned by some Eastern travellers. So extraordinary is their power of face, and so skilfully modulated are the inflections of their voices, that even a European, ignorant of the language, can follow the narrative with absorbing interest. One may fancy that if De Quincey's language were emptied of all meaning whatever, the mere sound of the words would move us, as the lovely word Mesopotamia moved Whitefield's hearer. The sentences are so skilfully constructed, that his finer passages fix themselves in the memory without the aid of metre. Humbler writers are content if they get through a single phrase without producing a decided jar. They aim at keeping up a steady jog-trot, which shall not give actual pain to the jaws of the reader. They no more think of weaving whole paragraphs or chapters into complex harmonies, than an ordinary pedestrian of "going to church in a galliard and coming home in a coranto." Even our great writers generally settle down to a stately but monotonous gait, after the fashion of Johnson or Gibbon, or are content with adopting a style as transparent and inconspicuous as possible. Language, according to the common phrase, is the dress of thought; and that dress is the best, according to modern canons of taste, which attracts least attention from its wearer. De Quincey scorns this sneaking maxim of prudence and boldly challenges our admiration by appearing in the richest colouring that can be got out of the dictionary. His language deserves a commendation sometimes De Quincey, then, announces himself as bestowed by ladies upon rich garments, an impassioned writer, as a writer in im- 'that it is capable of standing up itself.

De Quincey implicitly puts forward a passioned prose, and, finally, as applying claim which has been accepted by many impassioned prose to confessions. The competent critics. They declare, and he first question suggested by this assertion tacitly assumes, that he is a master of the concerns the sense of the word "impasEnglish language. He claims a sort of in- sioned." There is very little of what one fallibility in deciding upon the precise use ordinarily means by passion in the Confesof words and the merits of various styles. sions or elsewhere. There are no exploBut he explicitly claims something more. sions of political wrath, such as animate He declares that he has used language for the Letters on a Regicide Peace, or of a purposes to which it has hardly been ap- deep religious emotion, which breathes plied by any prose writers. The Confes- through many of our greatest prose-writers. sions of an Opium-eater and the Suspiria The language is undoubtedly a vehicle for de Profundis are, he tells us, "modes of sentiments of a certain kind, but hardly of impassioned prose, ranging under no prece- that burning and impetuous order which dents that I am aware of in any literature." we generally indicate by impassioned. It The only confessions that have previously is deep, melancholy reverie, not concentratmade any great impression upon the world ed essence of emotion; and the epithet are those of St. Augustine and of Rous- fails to indicate any specific difference beseau; but, with one short exception in St. tween himself and many other writers. Augustine, neither of those compositions The real peculiarity is not in the passion contains any passion, and, therefore, De expressed, but in the mode of expressing Quincey stands absolutely alone as the in- it. De Quincey resembles the story-tellers ventor and sole performer on a new music-mentioned by some Eastern travellers. So al instrument for such an instrument is extraordinary is their power of face, and the English language in his hands. He so skilfully modulated are the inflections belongs to a genus in which he is the only of their voices, that even a European, igindividual. The novelty and the difficulty norant of the language, can follow the of the task must be his apology if he fails, narrative with absorbing interest. One and causes of additional glory if he suc- may fancy that if De Quincey's language ceeds. He alone of all human beings who were emptied of all meaning whatever, the have stained paper since the world began, mere sound of the words would move us, has entered a path, which the absence of as the lovely word Mesopotamia moved rivals proves to be encumbered with some Whitefield's hearer. The sentences are unusual obstacles. The accuracy and value so skilfully constructed, that his finer of so bold a claim require a short exami- passages fix themselves in the memory nation. After all, every writer, however without the aid of metre. Humbler obscure, may contrive by a judicious defi- writers are content if they get through a nition to put himself into a solitary class. single phrase without producing a decided He has some peculiarities which distinguish jar. They aim at keeping up a steady him from all other mortals. He is the only jog-trot, which shall not give actual pain journalist who writes at a given epoch from to the jaws of the reader. They no more a particular garret in Grub Street, or the think of weaving whole paragraphs or only poet who is exactly six feet high and chapters into complex harmonies, than an measures precisely forty-two inches round ordinary pedestrian of "going to church the chest. Any difference whatever may in a galliard and coming home in a cobe applied to purposes of classification, ranto." Even our great writers generally and the question is whether the difference settle down to a stately but monotonous is, or is not, of much importance. By ex-gait, after the fashion of Johnson or Gibamining, therefore, the propriety of De Quincey's view of his own place in literature, we shall be naturally led to some valuation of his distinctive merits. In deciding whether a bat should be classed with birds or beasts, we have to determine the nature of the beast and the true theory of his wings. And De Quincey, if the comparison be not too quaint, is like the bat, an ambiguous character, rising on the wings of prose to the borders of the true poetical region.

De Quincey, then, announces himself as an impassioned writer, as a writer in im

bon, or are content with adopting a style as transparent and inconspicuous as possible. Language, according to the common phrase, is the dress of thought; and that dress is the best, according to modern canons of taste, which attracts least attention from its wearer. De Quincey scorns this sneaking maxim of prudence and boldly challenges our admiration by appearing in the richest colouring that can be got out of the dictionary. His language deserves a commendation sometimes bestowed by ladies upon rich garments, that it is capable of standing up itself.