Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/98

Rh the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention what that was." In Ricardo he believed he had found a man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, capable of taking up, as he says, we whole academy of modern economists, and throttling them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or braying their fungus heads to powder with a lady's fan. (Confessions, Part II.) This single work, which "deduced à priori from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials," and constructed what had been but a "collection of tentatiye discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis,"—availed to give the Opium-eater a pleasure and an activity which he had not known for years, and roused him to draw up his own "Prolegomena to all future Systems of Political Economy;" which "Peolegomena," like too many other literary designs of the same author, the world has never seen, nor is likely to see. Some writings, however, connected with this science, he has published; the little series entitled "Ricardo made Easy," for instance; the "Logic of Political Economy;" and, as reproduced in the present volume of Miscellanies, the so-called "Templars' Dialogues"—in which, fragmentary as in one sense the paper may be, the conflicting systems are, he reminds us in the preface, brought under review in a way to settle the central logic of their several polemics.

The "Revolt of the Tartars" is a remarkable narrative, perhaps more equable and sustained in dignity of style, and impressive emphasis of diction, than any other article whatever by the same writer, and of the same length. There are those who are displeased at his common habit of abrupt transition from the sublime to the ridiculous—at his incontinency of the passion for jesting, when to them jesting seems most out of place. To such we may commend this fine graphic piece of history (or historical romance?), which is singularly free from such sudden lapses, and is written as though the writer had these objectors in his mind's eye at the time of composition, and as though he had made a covenant with his pen, and had soberly put it to himself

The essay on "War" is the protest of one who feels strongly, and who strongly asserts, that the Peace Societies would, "if their power kept pace with their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease." Has an indignant outcry been uttered against Wordsworth for tracing the parentage of Carnage to the Most High Himself? De Quincey, on the other hand, "most heartily," and with his "profoundest sympathy," goes along with Wordsworth in this his "grand lyrical proclamation of a truth not less divine than it is mysterious, not less triumphant than it is sorrowful—viz., that amongst God's holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature, is 'mutual slaughter' amongst men, yes, that 'Carnage is God's daughter.'" For he contends that it belongs to the principle of progress in man, that he should for ever keep open a secret commerce in the last resort with the spirit of martyrdom on behalf of man's most saintly interests; and points out how, in proportion as the instruments for upholding or retrieving such saintly interests—where the violated rights of conscience are concerned, for