Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/358

342 distinctive character would fall in with the apparent plan according to which the several tomes are distributed.

After "Kant" comes a truly indigenous dissertation, such as none but its writer could put on paper, on "The System of the Heavens as revealed by Lord Rosse's Telescopes." It might seem written to prove that from the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step, and that the writer, for his part, can take the step without straining. It is an imbroglio of the magnificent and the ludicrous. Now we career through the awful grandeurs of dim worlds half realised, and now listen to wayward sallies of fun run riot, mad as a March hare, tricksy as Robin Goodfellow, and not a whit more particular in the choice of jokes. Nothing can be finer, in sustained majesty of style, than the bravura at the end—a glorious specimen of the author's command of diction, and his power to transfigure the glory of another into a new and greater glory, till the former seems to have no glory by reason of the glory that excellent. Richter himself would have assented, or we mistake the matter and the man.

Then, again, we come to "Joan of Arc"—an enthusiastic tribute to the purity, devotedness, self-sacrifice, and singleness of eye, of the daughter of Domrémy. Her own country can show no such tribute. Nothing so generous, so indignant, so "tender and true." Her trial is described and denounced in words that burn. "Never from the foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence, and all its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France! shepherdess, peasant girl! trodden under foot by all around thee, how I honour thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and true as that lightning to its mark, that ran before France and laggard Europe by many a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb the oracles of falsehood!" And what fatal intensity of reproach, what pathos and energy of upbraiding protest, in the concluding apostrophe to the Bishop of Beauvais! Withering scorn and redeeming pity meet together; and it is beautiful to see how mercy is made, even here, to rejoice against judgment.

"The Casuistry of Roman Meals" is one of those compounds of rare scholarship and lively gossip in which the author is perhaps without a fellow. We see the severe student unbending himself, and freely imparting of his well-hived stores to others, in a manner so amusing, and with aids and appliances so thoroughly gustful, that the veriest ignoramus fat classical lore is caught, fixed, converted; indeed, is in danger of coming to believe himself a crack classic, so much has he learned that was new to him, in so scant a space. Mr. de Quincey makes no parade of his reading; his contempt of mere pedantry is patent enough, as his raids against pedants and mere scholars as such are many and merciless; but the variety and breadth of his erudition are evidenced whenever the subject requires or allows of its appearance, and we are reminded of another who could, says the rhymer,

In his capacious mem'ry bottle

The lumb'ring lore of Aristotle;

Through Fichte, Schelling, Kant, go on straight,

Like Leslie, or La Place, demonstrate