He is quite pathetic, too, about the British Constitution. 'Destroy the House of Lords,' he exclaims, 'and henceforward, for people like you and me, England will be no habitable land.' Here, he seems to say, is one charming elysium, where no rude hand has swept away the cobwebs or replaced the good old-fashioned machinery; here we may find rest in the 'pure, holy, and magnificent Church,' whose Articles, interpreted by Coleridge, may guide us through the most wondrous of metaphysical labyrinths, and dwell in a grand constitutional edifice, rich in picturesque memories, and blending into one complex harmony elements contributed by a long series of centuries. And you, wretched French revolutionists, with your love of petty precision, and irreverent radicals and utilitarians, with your grovelling material notions, propose to level, and destroy, and break in upon my delicious reveries. No old Hebrew prophet could be more indignant with the enemy who threatened to break down the carved work of his temples with axes and hammers. But his complaint is, after all, the voice of the sluggard. Let me dream a little longer; for much as I love my country and its institutions, I cannot rouse myself to fight for them. It is enough if I call their assailants an ugly name or so, and at times begin to write what might be the opening pages of the preface to some very great work of the future. Alas! the first digression diverts the thread of the discourse; the task becomes troublesome, and the labour is abruptly broken off. And so in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quantity of opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new capacities in the language, and provided a good deal of respectable padding for magazines. It sounds, and many people will say that it is, a harsh and, perhaps they will add, a stupid judgment. If so, they may find plenty of admirers who will supply the eulogistic side here too briefly indicated. I will only say two things: first, that there are very few writers who have revealed new capacities in the language, and in English literature they might almost be counted on the fingers. Secondly, I must confess that I have often consulted De Quincey in regard to biographic and critical questions, and that though I have generally found something to admire, I have always found gross inaccuracies and almost always effeminate prejudices and mere flippancies draped in elaborate rhetoric. I take leave, therefore, to insist upon faults which are passed over too easily by writers of more geniality than I claim to possess. FOOTNOTES: [4] It is curious that De Quincey, in his Essay on Style, explains that political economy, and especially the doctrine of value, is one of those subjects which cannot be satisfactorily treated in dialogue--the very form which he chose to adopt for that particular purpose. _SIR THOMAS BROWNE_