Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/157

Rh midst of my own miséry; and, unless when I am checked by some more powerful feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in these annals of suffering or enjoyment." This interspersing, however, of wayward extravagance and burlesque, amid stately aisles of cathedral diction, will not be found to give an unreal air to the latter; the capricious wayside jest no more vitiates the authenticity of the swelling pathos, than do Hamlet's parenthetic apostrophes to old True-penny in the cellarage argue a mind too frivolous for appreciation of the epiphany of his ghostly sire.

De Quincey possesses a humour almost unique and sui generis in the art of telling a story with quaint garnishings. His manner of using details—his eye for accessory effects—his gravely-conducted evolution of episodical illustrations—are inimitable. No one is a greater adept at hauling in an old Joe Miller with a new face, a clean shirt and ruffles, a coat quite à la mode, and a tout ensemble which makes quite another man of him. No one can better develop the utmost possibilities of a musty adage, a threadbare proverb, a flavourless bit of slang, a joke that has seen better days, or an anecdote run to seed. He renews the youth of the effete article, and lends it wings to soar higher than when it walked the earth in virgin prime. Not that his stores of anecdotage are confined to second-hand and worn-out materials, for he often "comes down upon" you with a novelty dazzlingly new; but he is at no loss what to do with a thoroughly passé story, and can turn it to account though it be as old as the hills.

In the same vein he loves to carry on a protracted argument, applying to sheer nonsense a rigorous discipline of logical elucidation, and wasting, as it would appear, a senior wrangler's analytic powers on the elimination of a futile crotchet. Gratiano, of Venice, who talked an infinite deal of nothing, would have found in him a scrutator ever ready and willing to extract the two grains of wheat from the two bushels of chaff, and not at all backward to prove that the two bushels were of prime quality, not chaff or refuse by any means, but safe to get a glorious bid in Mark-lane. He expends a costly apparatus of ratiocination upon the veriest bagatelle, the most impracticable paradox; his complex system of mechanism perplexes the eye with wheels within wheels, one and all duly oiled with unctuous humour, and employed in spinning a yarn not large enough, or strong enough, to garter the taper knee of one of Queen Mab's satellites, or.to replace the traces of her chariot ("smallest spider's web"), or to mend her "whip, of cricket's bone" with "lash, of film." He exults in that stupendous scale of mountainous travail which results in the birth of a mouse; peerless ho is in the obstetric science of tickling a catastrophe of that sort; the bigger the mountain the better he is pleased; and it is not his fault if you do not hear Vulcan and his stithy pressed into the service, labouring within and on behalf of the labouring volcano, and performing some species of Cæsarian operation, to dignify the nativity: of the ridiculus mus. We see, as it were, a renowned musical composer, "potent, grave, and reverend," seat himself before the stately organ, and, selecting as his theme some street chanson—"O dear, what can the matter be!" or, "Polly, put the kettle on"—he pursues it through figures