4, and De Quincey was born in 1785, just in time to continue the
regal line. What was it, again, that entitled Johnson to kingly honors?
Was it learning? De Quincey was as erudite. Was it his style? There is
no writer in the language who in that matter may look down on De
Quincey.

If there ever was a writer "damned with faint praise," it was De
Quincey. Some stupid writer for the London "Athenaeum," for instance,
dared to compliment the poor "opium-chewer" after the following
style:--"He possessed taste, but _he lacked creative energy_; and his
subtle and highly refined intellect was ingenious and acute rather than
powerful." This reminds me of a criticism once passed upon Shakspeare by
a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had considerable
genius, but very little taste!]

Else I should plunge _in medias res_ upon a sketch of De Quincey's life;
were it not a rudeness amounting to downright profanity to omit the
important ceremony of prelibation, and that at a banquet to which,
implicitly, gods are invited. The reader will assuredly unite with me in
all such courtesies,--

"Neu desint epulis rosae";

particularly as the shade we deal with can be evoked only by peculiar
incantations,--only the heralding of certain precise claims will this
monarch listen to as the just _inferiae_, the fitting sacrifice or
hecatomb of our homage.

The key-note of preparation, the claim which preeminently should be set
forth in advance, is this: that De Quincey was the prince of
hierophants, or of pontifical hierarchs, as regards all those profound
mysteries which from the beginning have swayed the human heart,
sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it upwards to an
altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with the
shock of quaking anguish, down to earth. As it was the function of the
hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as
concrete incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey's to reveal in open
light the everlasting symbols, universally intelligible when once
disclosed, which are folded in the involutions of dreams and of those
meditations which most resemble dreams; and as to the manner of these
revelations, no Roman _pontifex maximus_, were it even Caesar himself,
could have rivalled their magisterial pomp.

The peculiarities of his life all point in the direction here indicated.
It was his remarkable experience which furnished him the key to certain