nk him among the humorists.

This deficiency of humour may be traced to the characteristic attitude of
the Vagabond towards life, which is one of eager curiosity. He is
inquisitive about its many issues, but with a good deal of the child's
eagerness to know how a thing happened, and who this is, and what that
is. Differing in many ways, as did Borrow and De Quincey, we find the
same insatiable curiosity; true, it expressed itself differently, but
there is a basic similarity between the impulse that took Borrow over the
English highways and gave him that zest for travel in other countries,
and the impulse that sent De Quincey wandering over the various roads of
intellectual and emotional inquiry. Thoreau's main reason for his two
years' sojourn in the woods was one of curiosity. He "wanted to know"
what he could find out by "fronting" for a while the essential facts of
life, and he left, as he says, "for as good a reason as I went there.
Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live." In other
words, inquisitiveness inspired the experiment, and inquisitiveness as to
other experiments induced him to terminate the Walden episode.

Now, in his own way, De Quincey was possibly the most inquisitive of all
the Vagabonds. The complete absence of the imperative mood in his
writings has moved certain moralists like Carlyle to impatience with him.
There is a fine moral tone about his disposition, but his writings are
engagingly unmoral (quite different, of course, from immoral). He has
called himself "an intellectual creature," and this happy epithet exactly
describes him. He collected facts, as an enthusiast collects curios, for
purposes of decoration. He observed them, analysed their features, but
almost always with a view to aesthetic comparisons.

And to understand De Quincey aright one must follow him in his
multitudinous excursions, not merely rest content with a few fragments of
"impassioned prose," and the avowedly autobiographic writings. For the
autobiography extends through the sixteen volumes of his works. The
writings, no doubt, vary in quality; in many, as in the criticism of
German and French writers, acute discernment and astounding prejudices
jostle one another. But this is no reason for turning impatiently away.
Indeed, it is an additional incentive to proceed, for they supply such
splendid psychological material for illustrating the temperament and
tastes of the writer. And this may