design and the pomp of achievement; but it is seldom that a writer who can produce an essay of the highest order cannot also meet successfully the demands of a more protracted effort. Narrowness of bounds, want of compass for complete elaboration, is often no slight obstacle. The more minute the mechanism, the more arduous the approach to perfection. The limits of the essay are at best cramped, and the compression, the adjusting of the subject to those limits, so that its character and bearings may be naturally and perspicuously exhibited, imply no ordinary skill. Besides, the advisability, or rather the possibility of undertaking a literary work of the first magnitude is dependent not less upon circumstances beyond the range of individual control than upon intellectual capacity. In asserting for De Quincey the leading position among the writers of this century, we are clothing him with no ordinary honors--honors which no man can rightfully enjoy without mental endowments at once multiform and transcendent. Our age thus far has been prolific in genius, inferior, indeed, to no other, except, perhaps, the Elizabethan; and, even here, inferior only at two points, tragedy and that section of poetry in which alone is found the incarnation of the sublime--the divine strains of John Milton. But in range of achievement our epoch has scarcely a rival. Mighty champions have arisen in almost every department of letters, and it is plain that, amid merits so divergent and wide removed, we can justly ascribe absolute precedence to no man without establishing, at the outset, a standard of ideal excellence, and by that adjusting the claims of all competitors.