to have
written "Dinner, Real and Reputed," or the paper on "The Essenes," in
both of which great erudition is necessary, but in which erudition is as
nothing when compared to the faculty of recombining into novel forms
what previously had been so grouped as to be misunderstood, or had
lacked just the one element necessary for introducing order. To have
written these would have entitled Rousseau to a separate sceptre. Or,
moving into a realm of art totally distinct from this, suppose him to
have been the author of "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts":
that would mount a new plume in Rousseau's hat. But I happen just now to
be reminded of another little paper, numbering about six pages,
entitled, "On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth": give him _that_,
too. Why, the little French king is beginning to assume an imperial
consequence! We beg the reader's pardon for indulging in comparisons of
this nature, which are always disagreeable; but we have this excuse,
that the two writers are often mentioned as on the same level, and with
no appreciation of that unlimited range of power which belongs to De
Quincey, but not at all to Rousseau. All but one of the trophies which
we have hypothetically transferred to the Frenchman adorn a single
volume out of twenty-two, in the Boston edition. Nor is this one
imperial column adorned by these alone: there are, besides,--alas for
Rousseau!--two other _spolia opima_ by which the French master is, in
his own field, proved not the first, nor even the second,--_proximus,
sed non secundus_,--so wide is the distance between De Quincey and _any_
other antagonist. These two are the essays respectively entitled, "Joan
of Arc," and "The English Mail-Coach."

[Footnote A: Of De Quincey's humor, a friend once remarked to me, that
it always reminded him of an elephant attempting to dance. Now, without
any doubt, an elephant could dance after an elephantine fashion; but
surely you would never catch him going through the movements of a jig or
a Virginia "breakdown." He never lets you forget that he is an elephant.
So with De Quincey. Levity is an element farthest removed from _his_
humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all,
you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a
tragedy of pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey's works.

There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen
Aristophaneses. There was something, too, in it