De Quincey is, however, first of all a writer of ornate English, which was never, with him, a mere cover to bare thought. Overpraise and mispraise him as anybody may, he cannot be overpraised for this. Mistake as he chose to do, and as others have chosen to do, the relative value of his gift, the absolute value of it is unmistakable. What other Englishman, from Sir Thomas Browne downwards, has written a sentence surpassing in melody that on Our Lady of Sighs: "And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams and with wrecks of forgotten delirium"? Compare that with the masterpieces of some later practitioners. There are no out-of-the-way words; there is no needless expense of adjectives; the sense is quite adequate to the sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense. And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length--even in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, _tour de force_ on Our Lady of Darkness--De Quincey ever quite equalled the combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come close to it. The _Suspiria_ are full of such passages--there are even some who prefer _Savannah la Mar_ to the _Ladies of Sorrow_. Beautiful as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears there. The famous passages of the _Confessions_ are in every one's memory; and so I suppose is the _Vision of Sudden Death_. Many passages in _The Cæsars_, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and the close of _Joan of Arc_ is as famous as the most ambitious attempts of the _Confessions_ and the _Mail Coach_. Moreover, in all the sixteen volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there, alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast, deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey--stronger than in any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master, Wilson.