caustic wit. Thus did Burke, Hall, Horsley, and Chalmers.

Akin to De Quincey's length of sentence, is his ungovernable habit of
digression. You can as soon calculate on the motions of a stream of the
aurora, as on those of his mind. From the title of any one of his
papers, you can never infer whether he is to treat the subject
announced, or a hundred others--whether the subjects he is to treat are
to be cognate, or contradictory, to the projected theme--whether, should
he begin the subject, he shall ever finish it--or into how many
foot-notes he is to draw away, as if into subterranean pipes, its pith
and substance. At every possible angle of his road he contrives to break
off, and hence he has never yet reached the end of a day's journey.
Unlike Christian in the "Pilgrim," _he_ welcomes every temptation to go
astray--and, not content with shaking hands with old Worldly Wiseman, he
must, before climbing Mount Difficulty, explore both the way of Danger
and that of Destruction. It may be inquired, if this arise from the
fertility or from the frailty of his genius--from his knowledge of, and
dominion over every province of thought, or from his natural or acquired
inability to resist "right-hand or left-hand defections," provided they
promise to interest himself and to amuse his readers. Judging from
Coleridge's similar practice, we are forced to conclude that it is in De
Quincey too--a weakness fostered, if not produced, by long habits of
self-indulgence.

And yet, notwithstanding such defects (and we might have added to them
his use of logical formulae at times when they appear simply ridiculous,
his unnecessary scholasticism, and display of learning, the undue
self-complacence with which he parades his peculiar views, and explodes
his adversary's, however reputed and venerable, and a certain air of
exaggeration which swathes all his written speech), what splendid powers
this strange being, at all times and on all subjects, exerts! With what
razor-like sharpness does he cut the most difficult distinctions! What
learning is his--here compelling wonder, from its variety and minute
accuracy; and there, from the philosophical grasp with which he holds
it, in compressed masses! And, above all, what grand, sombre, Miltonic
gleams his imagination casts around him on his way; and in what deep
swells of organ-like music do his thoughts often, harmoniously and
irrepressibly, move! The three prose-writers of this century, who, as