But the comparative absence of humour in De Quincey is another characteristic of Vagabondage. Humour is largely a product of civilization, and the Vagabond is only half-civilized. I can see little genuine humour in either Hazlitt or De Quincey. They had wit to an extent, it is true, but they had this despite, not because, of their Vagabondage. Thoreau, notwithstanding flashes of shrewd American wit, can scarcely be accounted a humorist. Whitman was entirely devoid of humour. A lack of humour is felt as a serious deficiency in reading the novels of Jefferies; and the airy wit of Stevenson is scarcely full-bodied enough to rank him among the humorists. This deficiency of humour may be traced to the characteristic attitude of the Vagabond towards life, which is one of eager curiosity. He is inquisitive about its many issues, but with a good deal of the child’s eagerness to know how a thing happened, and who this is, and what that is. Differing in many ways, as did Borrow and De Quincey, we find the same insatiable curiosity; true, it expressed itself differently, but there is a basic similarity between the impulse that took Borrow over the English highways and gave him that zest for travel in other countries, and the impulse that sent De Quincey wandering over the various roads of intellectual and emotional inquiry. Thoreau’s main reason for his two years’ sojourn in the woods was one of curiosity. He “wanted to know” what he could find out by “fronting” for a while the essential facts of life, and he left, as he says, “for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live.” In other words, inquisitiveness inspired the experiment, and inquisitiveness as to other experiments induced him to terminate the Walden episode. Now, in his own way, De Quincey was possibly the most inquisitive of all the Vagabonds. The complete absence of the imperative mood in his writings has moved certain moralists like Carlyle to impatience with him. There is a fine moral tone about his disposition, but his writings are engagingly unmoral (quite different, of course, from immoral). He has called himself “an intellectual creature,” and this happy epithet exactly describes him. He collected facts, as an enthusiast collects curios, for purposes of decoration. He observed them, analysed their features, but almost always with a view to æsthetic comparisons.