and how skates were made before iron had achieved its present adaptability to all the wants of man. His account is, you will see, a translation from the Latin of Fitzherbert.

When that great Moorish Lake at the North part of the City wall is frozen over, great companies of young men goe to sport upon the yce, then fetching a runne, and setting their feet at a distance, and placing their bodies sidewise, they slide a great way. Others take heapes of yce, as if it were great Mil-stones, and make seats many going before, draw him that. sits thereon, holding one another by the hand; in going so fast, sometime they all fall downe together: some are better practised to the yce, and binde to their shooes, Bones, as the legs of some beasts, and hold Stakes in their hands, headed with sharpe yron, which sometimes they strike against the yce; and these men goe on with such speed, as doth a Bird in the Aire, or Darts shot from some warlike Engine: sometime two men set themselves at a distance, and runne one against another, as it were at tilt, with these Stakes, wherewith one or both parties are throwne downe, not without some hurt to their bodies; and after their fall, by reason of the violent motion, are carried a good distance one from another and wheresoever the yce doth touch their head, it rubs off the skin and bruiseth it: (totum decorticat, Fitzh!) and if one fall upon his leg or his arme, it is usually broken: But young men being greedy of honour, and desirous of victory, doe thus exercise themselves in counterfeit battels, that they may beare the brunt more strongly, when they come to it in good earnest.

*

How thoroughly the fine old fellow understands the object of athletic sports, which I rejoice to see at last beginning to be appreciated again in our own day. And isn't his idea of the correct attitude for sliding delightful, and the sang froid with which he talks of a flayed face or a broken leg! I wonder if any museum preserves a specimen of those bone skates, and how they were fastened to the shoe: the conventional spike must have been an impossible adjunct, and tight binding the only means of cohesion; even as I have seen the

present representatives of Uncas and Chingachgook carefully hammer the spikes and screws out of modern skates, and then strapping them under moccasins little thicker than the cover of Fraser's Magazine, scud lustily over their frozen lakes. But of course an outside edge or any of the elegances of skating are beyond the power of gear so illsecured, and even a sharp turn would have a strong tendency to reverse the relative positions of skate and foot, to their mutual disadvantage.

It was dusk when we left the pool, and it is quite dark now; and here come home all the rest, hurrying in from a snow-storm which has considerately postponed till now the rites of sepulture which it has long been meditating for our ice, and permitted it as long a life, and eke as merry, as it conveniently could. No more skating while this frost lasts; and the myrmidons of the squire's ice-carts, whom I spied lurking in ambush behind the trees as we came away, may now wreak their mischief on the pool without drawing down our to-morrow's malisons on their heads. Needs not to tell of the special messenger from the Hall, with a round robin of thanks from all the ladies for their safety, the said bird professing to be the first instalment only. Less need still to tell of the other and weaker attempt at thanks carried back by the messenger as his 'return fare,' which is neither round nor a robin; indeed what robin-or what nightingale could worthily sing of the kindness and bravery to which it is therein alluded.

Well, I must say that I feel most voluptuously comfortable, and have a huge appetite for dinner. And don't you find yourself a healthier and a happier man, and see cause to bless me for forcibly abducting you to air and exercise, from your miserable scheme of wasting this glorious day in peevish pokings of the fire, and helpless shiverings over the newspaper?

T.G. F.

them, do so as a whole, and those who do not like them do not read them at all. In the case of a writer who has made several great efforts, but has occasionally broken down under the weight of his subject, we allow for failures, we take one part and leave the rest. But writers like those we allude to, do not take up subjects because they are good or exciting ones, but because they happen to know something about them; or, having started a literary problem, like to run it down. They begin just when they like, and stop when they find their ideas running dry or their manner getting tedious. To such writers, the existence of magazines is a great benefit, indeed almost a necessity; for, though a man might write a variety of essays when it suited him, and publish them afterwards, the necessity of their appearing in a popular form is a salutary check on pedantry, and sometimes on diffuseness, and sometimes acts as a stimulus without which the article would not come into being at all.

Connected with this discursiveness, and, as it were, libertinism of the intellect, we find several other features more or less characteristic of the class we have described, and which are exhibited in full force in De Quincey. We have alluded to his non-popularity, and the point is well illustrated in some remarks of his own upon Charles Lamb, which throw so much light upon his own position that we must quote a part of them :

It sounds paradoxical, but it is not so in a bad sense, to say, that in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world they are not interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had found it repulsive. Primâ facie, it must suggest some presumption against a book, that it has failed to gain public attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have

kindled a feud against its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign. That argues power. Hatred may

be promising. The deepest revolutions of mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have left a reader unimpressed, is in itself a neutral result, from which the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even simple failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from positive powers in a writer, from special originalities, such as rarely reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary understanding. It seems little to be perceived, how much the great scriptural idea of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life. In reality, the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiogonomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognising its own; and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities, for instance, of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it does in the realities of life.

He goes on to say that there are certain qualities forbidding to the world and the thoughtless, which yet command a select audience in every generation, and that the peculiarity which recommends them to the few, is the combination which they present of the writer's personal character with the actual views he expresses, each mutually enhancing and interpreting the other. "There is in modern literature a whole class of writers, though not a large one, standing within the same category; some marked originality of character in the writer becomes a co-efficient with what he says to a common result; you must sympathize with this personality in the author before you can appreciate the most significant parts of his views.' He observes

1861.]

that there were no such books in the classical times, and instances Montaigne, Sir T. Browne, La Fontaine, Swift, Sterne, Harmann, Hippel, and Jean Paul, as the most notable illustrations of his view among the moderns.

The reader who is acquainted with these writers will have at once remarked that they have all much more of the humorist than De Quincey. It is not in this respect that we mean to compare him with them, though, as we hope to show, his humour is one of the most prominent of his faculties; but in respect of the intermixture of his personality with what he writes. Those who think they have disposed of this kind of thing by calling it egotism,' forget that the first business of a writer who has anything to say is to get himself read, and that if egotism accomplishes this end, its exhibition is justifiable. Prima facie, no doubt egotism is an objectionable thing, but this is not because it is egotism, but because it is generally irrelevant. We use the phrase cui bono, and in literature, perhaps in other matters, the correlative cui malo would sometimes be equally convenient. Lord Palmerston's celebrated definition of dirt as only "matter in the wrong place,' is susceptible of a very wide applica tion. Why do we not object to an orator for being egotistical? He does nothing but get up and say 'I think so and so." Not only this, but the more he tells you how he came to entertain his views, the more disposed we feel to enter into them. This egotism, in another point of view, is the measure of the strength of his convictions. An impersonal speaker seems impassive, uninfluenced, and uninfluencing. In such literature as that before us, egotism is the substitute for personal communication. It is the author's method of reaching us; of feeling, so to speak, the pulse of his audience. Books are very good things in their way, but they are at the best a succedaneum for the human being himself, and he is the most successful

and powerful writer who makes us forget that we have a book before us, and speaks to us as nearly as may be face to face. Probably the intellectual pleasure the most elevated in character, and enjoyed with the least consciousness of effort, is the discussion of literary, philosophical, and social problems like those which De Quincey has treated, between men with sufficient power to deal with them, and geniality enough to temper the dry thread of argument. Nobody who can appreciate such conversation would deny that it was more enjoyable than the perusal even of the masterpieces of literature, because it is in its nature more stimulating to the mind. Under the influence of a great genius in a book, we are too apt to be merely passive and receptive; we cannot stop him to ask what he means, and get him to say it over again in different words; we cannot suggest an απορία, and get him to answer it. All this can be done in such conversation as we have in our eye, and that which comes nearest to it at the present day are those digressive and discursive essays in which, while the main thread of the argument is on the whole adhered to, there is a disposition to diverge in pursuit of any object of interest which may cross the reader's path, a readiness to anticipate and meet the objections and inquiries which may occur to him, and a communion of feeling kept up which sustains the attention with as little fatigue as is compatible with any intellectual effort at all. Such an essay resembles in its course the brook of which Tennyson sings, not destitute of fish for those who know how to catch them, winding here and there to join the brimming river' at last; or it reminds us of one of those pleasant cross-country expeditions, in which our readers must have shared at one time or other; the leisurely walk, with half the day before us to do it in, to some distant point seen over intervening ridges of forest, through which pater and mater-familias pace quietly, without turning to

right or left, while the children divaricate in all directions, to track a mole, dig up a rabbit, or discover a spring; indicating their whereabout only by the distant bark of the collusores catelli, or the waving of the tall fern through which they force their way; but ever and anon coming back to the main line of march, and all converging to the right point at the conclusion of the ramble. No one of course would maintain that such excursions afford the same amount of training as sustained rifle drill or assiduous gymnastics; and we do not mean to put the digressive essay into competition as a mental exercise, with the stiff metaphysical treatise, the précis of various histories, or the strict scientific work; but both the summer walk and its literary counterpart give wholesome exercise, and suggest many new objects of interest which, when once started, may be booked for thorough investigation at some future time.

That such writing as we have described should have its full weight, it must have at least three qualities. In the first place, its subjects must be good and valuable; desultory conversation on trifles is the merest impertinence which can be inflicted on a reader. Next, it must not be the painful elaboration of a mind unused to the topic, and filled only for the occasion, whether with thought or reading; it must be the outcome of a full reservoir, which can bear copious draughts without showing the mud at the bottom. Thirdly, its style must be good, and not only good, but capable of variety, now humorous, now precise and logical, now familiar, now rising into eloquence or pathos. To a writer on such matters, nothing should come amiss; he ought, like Socrates, to be ready to talk to anybody about anything, and to adopt conversational ease or the most impassioned oratory without seeming to unite anything incongruous. He must be precise, because the ideas he handles, irreducible as they are to exact demonstration or comparison with facts, and dealing with whatever is most

subtle and evanescent in feeling and thought, require the greatest accuracy in expression to make them appear either new or worth recording. De Quincey remarks in his Essay on Style that we had a right to expect perfection in style from Greece, because Greek speculation was evolved from the mind within independently of external realities; whereas the exuberance of objective knowledge, by accumulating materials which are themselves worthy of inquiry, tends to wean the mind from speculation, and thus from the culture of style; the matter transcends and oppresses the manner :

The matter tells without any manner at all. But he who has to treat a vague question, such as Cicero calls a quæstio infinita, where everything is to be finished out of his own peculiar feelings, or his own way of viewing things (in contradistinction to a quæstio finita, where determinate data from without

already furnish the main materials), soon finds that the manner of treating it not only transcends the matter, but very often, and in a very great proportion, is the matter. In very many subjective exercises of the mind, as, for instance, in that class of poetry which has been formally designated by this epithet (meditative poetry, we mean, in opposition to the Homeric, which is intensely objective), the problem before the writer is to project his own inner mind; to bring out consciously what yet lurks by involution in many unanalysed feelings; in short, to pass through a prism and radiate into distinct elements what previously had been even to himself but dim. and confused ideas intermixed with each other. Now, in such cases, the skill with which detention or conscious arrest

is given to the evanescent, external projection to what is internal, outline to what is fluxionary, and body to what is vague, all this depends entirely on the command over language as the one sole means of embodying ideas; and, in such cases, the style, or, in the largest sense, manner, is confluent with the matter.

No one who is at all acquainted with De Quincey's works will hesitate to admit that he possesses in a remarkable degree the three characteristics on which we have insisted as necessary for the success of the Digressive Essay. Of the interesting nature of his subjects a