t of mystery which arrested and engrossed his
thoughts. Similar elements invested all secret societies with an awful
grandeur in his conception. So, too, the complicated operations of great
cities such as London, which he call the "Nation of London," where even
Nature is mimicked, both in her strict regularity of results, and in the
seeming unconsciousness of all her outward phases, hiding all meaning
under the enigmas that defy solution. In order to this effect it was
absolutely necessary that there should be not simply one mystery
standing alone by itself, and striking in its portentous significance;
there must have been more than this,--namely, a network of occult
influences, a vast organization, wheeling in and out upon itself,
gyrating in mystic cycles and epicycles, repeating over and again its
dark omens, and displaying its insignia in a never-ending variety of
shapes. To him intricacy the most perplexing was also the most inviting.
It was this which lent an overwhelming interest to certain problems of
history that presented the most labyrinthian mazes to be disinvolved:
for the demon that was in him sought after hieroglyphics that by all
others had been pronounced undecipherable; and not unfrequently it was
to his eye that for the first time there seemed to be an unknown element
that must be supplied. Such a problem was presented by the religious
sect among the Hebrews entitled the _Essenes_. Admitting the character
and functions of this sect to have been those generally ascribed to it
no special importance. But the idea once having occurred to De Quincey
that the general assumption was the farthest removed from the
truth,--than there was an unknown _x_ in the problem, which could be
satisfied by no such meagre hypothesis,--that, to meet the urgent
demands of the case, there must be substituted for this Jewish sect an
organization of no less importance than the Christian Church
itself,--that this organization, thus suddenly brought to light, was
one, moreover, that, from the most imperative necessity, veiled itself
from all eyes, uttering its sublime articles of faith, and even its very
name, to itself only in secret recesses of silence:--from the moment
that all this was revealed to De Quincey, there was thenceforth no limit
to his profound interest. Two separate essays he wrote on this
subject,[A] of which he seemed never to tire.

[Footnote A: Yet, marvellous as it may seem, he wrote the second without
being