CHAPTER XXVI.

DE QUINCEY AND MACAULAY.

N the generation that succeeded Coleridge and Lamb, the two greatest prose-writers are probably Thomas De Quincey and Lord Macaulay. Both belong to the first half of the century.

2. THOMAS DE QUINCEY was born in Manchester in 1785. He was educated at the Manchester Grammar School, and also at Worcester College, Oxford. At Oxford he led a solitary life, speaking to no one, and reading the most out-ofthe-way books in Greek and in English literature. "For the first two years of my residence in Oxford," he says, "I compute that I did not utter one hundred words." He had previously learned the hardest experiences of life during a stay in London for a year— hiding from his friends, sleeping where he could, and eating when he had anything to eat. In 1808 he took a cottage in Grasmere. In 1804 he had been obliged to take laudanum for a severe attack of neuralgia; and, when residing in the Lake Country, he became a confirmed opium-eater. This habit determined his mode of living, and destroyed in him all power of regular and settled work. He began hundreds of books and essays; he finished almost nothing. His allowance rose to 8000 drops of laudanum a day-a quantity sufficient to kill forty men. Latterly he lived chiefly in Edinburgh, and died

there in 1859.

3. His literary works consist chiefly of articles contributed to magazines such as the London Magazine, Tait's Edinburgh, and Blackwood. These were afterwards collected by an American firm, and published as The Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey." Among the most important of them are:

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The Confessions of an Opium-Eater;

Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy;

Suspiria De Profundis,* and

The Vision of Sudden Death.

He also wrote the articles on Shakspeare and Pope in the Encyclopædia Britannica. There is probably nowhere in our literature such a union of imaginative power with eloquence and skill in phrasing. Jeremy Taylor is as eloquent, but he had not De Quincey's wide culture and marvellous imagination; Coleridge may be as imaginative, but he has not the power of sustained eloquence shown by the younger writer. He transcends all other modern prosewriters, too, in the majesty and beauty of his rhythm. There is a high proportion of Latin words in his style. He is also very fond of the inverted sentence, in which the verb precedes its nominative, and the usual arrangement of the other words is changed. Thus he says:

"Never in any equal number of months had my understanding so much expanded as during this visit to Laxton."

The following is a typical example of his style :

A DREAM.

The dream commenced with a music which I now often hear in dreams-a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I know not where,-somehow, I know not how,-by some beings, I know not whom,-a battle, a strife, an agony was conducting was evolving like a great drama or piece of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams—where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement-had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet, again, had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came

*Sighs from the depths.

sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or from the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells; and with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated-everlasting farewells! and again and yet again reverber

ated-everlasting farewells!

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud: "I will sleep no more!"

4. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859) is the most popular prose-writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, and also the most brilliant. His father, Zachary Macaulay, was one of the earliest advocates for the abolition of slavery in our colonies. Young Macaulay was educated privately, and at the age of eighteen was entered of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an excellent classical scholar (he gained the Craven scholarship), won two medals for English verse, graduated with honours in 1822, and was Fellow of his College

in 1824.

5. The ambition of his life was to be a literary man; and, while still at college, he began to write for the press. His aim was to be an historian; and his chief object in that department was to study and to realise for himself and his readers the private life of the common people—the wants and the ways of thinking and feeling of the masses. His first great coup was an article on Milton in the Edinburgh Review, in August, 1825, which took the literary public by storm. Nothing so brilliant had been seen from the pen of so young a man. In 1830 he sat in Parliament for Calne; in 1834 was presi. dent of a law commission for India; and in 1835 was member of the Supreme Council in Calcutta. He returned from India in 1838. 1839 he sat for Edinburgh, was unseated in 1847; but in 1852 the Edinburgh electors returned him at their own expense, unasked, to the House. In 1857 he was called to the House of Peers. He died at Kensington on the 28th of December, 1859.

In

6. His literary labour is synchronous with his work as a statesman and administrator. Much of the earlier results of his historical investigations appeared in the form of articles in the Edinburgh Review, and of biographies in the Encyclopædia Britannica; in 1842 appeared his Lays of Ancient Rome; and in 1849 the first two

volumes of his History of England. The second two volumes were published in 1855; and to the eagerness with which they were received "the annals of Paternoster Row hardly furnish any parallel." His strongest faculty was his memory; and he had the largest power, among all our English writers, of marshalling crowds of details into one brilliant and impressive whole. For his history, he read thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of occasional pamphlets, tracts, sermons, and loose sheets, all the old street-ballads he could lay hands on, Acts of Parliament, and, in short, every printed thing that could throw light upon the events he was writing on. His greatest works are his—

Essays;

History of England;
Lays of Ancient Rome.

The Essays are chiefly on historical subjects, and are mostly biographies of celebrated persons, such as Bacon, Pitt, Frederick the Great, Warren Hastings, and Clive. The essay on Warren Hastings is generally considered his best. The History begins with the accession of James II., and is brought down only to the death of William III. The Lays of Ancient Rome are an attempt to give a poetical and practical form to Niebuhr's theory that the earlier "history" of Rome is formed simply from the legends found in old ballads, which sing of mythical personages and events. Macaulay therefore puts these old stories into a ballad form. These Lays are perhaps not poetry; but they are stirring and vigorous rhetoric of the highest kind, embodied in bold and sonorous verse. Sydney Smith said of him: "There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as great; he is like a book in breeches."

7. The peculiarities of his style come from the enormous stock of facts that lay in his memory, and from his eagerness to marshal these facts so as to produce a brilliant and never-to-be-forgotten picture. He is fond of three things: (1) details; (2) comparison of persons with persons, of events with events, and of policies with policies; and (3) of antithesis.

Thus (1), in describing the genius of Burke, he enters into details as minute as an orator could, without destroying the perspective of his statements.

BURKE.

He had, in the highest degree, that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal. India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the cocoa-tree; the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble; the thatched roof of the peasant's hut; the rich tracery of the mosque where the imaum prays with his face to Mecca; the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols; the devotee swinging in the air; the graceful maiden with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the river side; the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes; the spears and the silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close litter of the lady,-all those things were to him as the objects amidst which his own life had been passed, as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield and St. James's Street. All India was present to the eye of his mind,— from the halls where suitors lay gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns, to the wild moor where the gipsy camp was pitched; from the bazaar, humming like a beehive with the crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle, where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyenas. He had just as lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord George Gordon's riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as of the execution of Dr. Dodd. Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.

In the following passage, he leads us, by a long series of minor comparisons (2), up to an intense feeling of the deceit ingrained in the character of Nuncomar :

NUNCOMAR.

Of his moral character it is difficult to give a notion to those who are acquainted with human nature only as it appears in our island. What the Italian is to the Englishman, what the Hindoo is to the Italian, what the Bengalee is to other Hindoos, that was Nuncomar to other Bengalees. The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak, even to helpless.