commingling the grave and gay; his forays of wit, his quaint flourishes of fancy, his adroit but never malicious passes of satire; all are fairly, if not fully, represented in this volume of Miscellanies.
Dull, dense, matter-of-fact people—people of "imperfect sympathies"—people who recognise no line of beauty that is not straight, and whose literary vision is exercised from an angle anything but acute, though so narrow in its range—people who know little Latin beyond Cui bono (which they are quoting in season, out of season), and who never could see the joke of the senior wrangler's objection to Milton's epic, But what does it prove?—good, worthy, solid, stolid, stupid souls of this order, will probably enough be "stumped" by the very first subject in the present volume—the Military Nun of Spain. We can make nothing of it, you may hear them say. They are perplexed as to its drift. They resent the dubious tactics of the narrator, who leaves them uncertain whether or when they are to laugh or cry. Fairly started as they suppose in a paragraph grave even to tragedy, abruptly they are thrown into a perfect quandary by interjectional sentences, allusions, fancies, boldly and broadly ludicrous. Endeavouring to accommodate themselves to this new inspiration, and to enter into the mirth which they presume is in store for them, they are again flung back by their author's seemingly capricious recurrence to tones of solemn reverie and passionate earnestness. Shakspeare himself, bounding from sleepless Macbeth to a sleepy Porter,—Shakspeare himself, interrupting the stern, sad contemplations of Hamlet by the songs of the churchyard Clown,—Shakspeare himself, who intersperses the latest agonising words and thoughts of Cleopatra with the quips and quirks of the "rural fellow," who brings her "the pretty worm of Nilus, that kills and pains not,"—Shakspeare himself, in this eccentric orbit, this lawless mood of his, is not more unaccountable, not to say offensive, to a starched and straitlaced Frenchman, imbued with the prejudices of pedantry, and saturated with the traditions of the schools, than is the Opium-eater in his "miscellaneous" mood, in his truant disposition, to a non-plussed literalist of the kind just supposed.
How the story of this Military Nun of Spain would fare at the hands of a prosaic matter-of-fact man, scribbling right on, as the crow flies, jealous or incapable of pause, or parenthesis—errantry, or excursus—break, or interval—additament, or episode,—we know not, nor care to know. Enough, that told as Mr. de Quincey tells it, with its fulness of moving accidents by flood and field, it is a singularly interesting tale, garnished with an odd intermixture of reflections, suggestions, and nondescript details, often piquant, often affecting, not unfrequently
Solemn and sweet as when low winds attune
The midnight pines.
Happy Catalina, to have met, centuries after her life's fitful fever, with such a biographer! A right admiring and affectionate one withal—chivalric and cordial as could have been any compatriot and contemporary of her own. "Bonny Kate! Noble Kate!" he once exclaims, and seems again and again on the point of repeating the benison and the homage—"I would there were not two centuries laid between us, that I might have the pleasure of kissing thy fair hand." But for the two centuries, Kate's lips would be at the service of such a biographer, and a hundred welcomes too.
