Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/156

144 shape of an entire magazine to myself—I would curry for "no favour," but valiantly undertake the proof, and establish it to my own entire satisfaction, and to yours, unless an æs triplex of brassy prejudice encases your pericardium—by dint of profuse quotations, fragments of fun, huge junks of jocosity, and elegant extracts of mirth, from my author's exhaustless cornucopæia. But how can I convince. a stout-hearted infidel, obstinate in his hostility and firm on his pins ag a rampant red lion, by a homœopathic dose of some two or three pages? How can I purge the man’s bile by such a globule as that? By his leave, therefore, or without it, I must on the present occasion postulate and assume the reality and genuineness of the claims in question, The quantity of evidence which must be brought into court, to demonstrate in its length and breadth the validity of those claims, is so ample, that I must beg my incredulous friend to take it for granted. Meanwhile, let me refer you to my author's Lectures on Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts, in illustration of his gravely-facetious irony—to his reviews of Parr and Bentley, as specimens of vivacious gleeful scholarship—to his "Nautico-military Nun of Spain," his "System of the Heavens," his critiques on Schlosser, Landor, Sir W. Hamilton, and others, as teeming with quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. The most pathetic, the most rhetorical, the most ratiocinative, the most impassioned of his writings, are varied and interwoven—disfigured if you will—by a pervading, or rather intermitting presence, "not to be put by," of frolicsome banter or jocular allusion. His most solemn texts have a marginal referenced to Laughter holding both his sides, From grave to gay is, with Him, as brief a journey as from the sublime to the ridiculous—a single step. As Shakspeare makes farce a "rider" to his main proposition, tragedy—confronting Hamlet with a quibbling gravedigger, coupling Lear with cap and bells, relieving the regicidal horror in Macbeth by the interjection of a prosy, dull-pated porter0so De Quincey studs his most impressive and sustained eloquence with digressions of vagrant merriment, and the tears which a sentence ago were those of anguish, in the next do duty as accompaniments of festal laughter. He is conscious—habes confitentem—of this motley complexion in his style. Thus—where he describes the abyss of divine enjoyment suddenly revealed to him by his first "exhibition" of laudanum, calling it a for all human woes, and grandly illustrating the revulsion it produced within him,—the upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit,—the apocalypse of the world within,—he goes on to calculate how happiness (the secret whereof had been a disputed point with philosophers of all times) might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket—and how portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle—and how peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach. He then comments on his own chequered mood, as follows: "But, if I talk in this way, the reader will think I am laughing; and I can assure him, that nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium; its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion; in his happiest state, the opium-eater cannot present himself in the character of L’Allegro; even then he speaks and thinks as becomes Penseroso. Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible way of jesting at times in the