“Obligations to Gombrom” do not afford the best qualification for the historian. One can imagine the hair rising in horror on the head of the late Professor Freeman at the idea of the opium-eater sitting down seriously to write history. Yet he had, like Froude, the power of seizing upon the spectacular side of great movements which many a more accurate historian has lacked. Especially striking is his _Revolt of the Tartars_—the flight eastward of a Tartar nation across the vast steppes of Asia, from Russia to Chinese territory. Ideas impressed him rather than facts, and episodes rather than a continuous chain of events. But when he was interested, he had the power of describing with picturesque power certain dramatic episodes in a nation’s history. A characteristic of the literary Vagabond is the eager versatility of his intellectual interests. He will follow any path that promises to be interesting, not so much with the scholar’s patient investigation as with the pedestrian’s delight in “fresh woods and pastures new.” A prolific writer for the magazines, it is inevitable that there should be a measure that is ephemeral in De Quincey’s voluminous writings. But it is impossible not to be struck by the wide range of his intellectual interests. A mind that is equally at home in the economics of Ricardo and the transcendentalism of Wordsworth; that can turn with undiminished zest from Malthus to Kant; that could deal lucidly with the “Logic of Political Economy,” despite the dream-world that finds expression in the “impassioned prose”; that could delight in such broadly farcical absurdities as “_Sortilege and Astrology_,” and such delicately suggestive studies as “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” a mind of this adventurous and varied type is assuredly a very remarkable one. That he should touch every subject with equal power was not to be expected, but the analytic brilliance that characterizes even his mystical writings enabled him to treat such subjects as political economy with a sureness of touch and a logical grasp that has astonished those who had regarded him as merely an inconsequential dreamer of dreams. IV I cannot agree with Dr. Japp {48} when, in the course of some laudatory remarks on De Quincey’s humour, he says: “It is precisely here that De Quincey parts company, alike from Coleridge and from Wordsworth; neither of them had humour.” In the first place De Quincey’s humour never seems to me very genuine. He could play with ideas occasionally in a queer fantastic way, as in his elaborate gibe on Dr. Andrew Bell.