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DE QUINCEY'S MISCELLANIES.[1]
Readers to whom Seneca is not too heavy, and readers again to whom Plautus is not too light,—readers whose hobby is political economy, and readers again who delight in a jeu d'esprit,—they to whom historical narrative is the first charm, and they to whom impassioned eloquence is all-exciting,—will all find themselves severally catered for in this new volume of De Quincey's "Selections, Grave and Gay." First comes that famous piece of irony, the Lecture on "Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts." Next, a seasonably published narrative called "Revolt of the Tartars; or, Flight of the Kalmuck Khan and his people from the Russian territories to the frontiers of China"—of particular interest in a day when the national mind is so much occupied with war in Russia and rebellion in China. Then, the dialogues of three Templars (Mr. de Quincey was himself of the Temple once) on Political Economy, chiefly in relation to the principles of Ricardo—to which some seventy (or, by'r ladye, inclining to fourscore) pages are devoted. After these, another seasonably published essay, on the absorbing topic of War—about as shocking and audacious a thesis as drab broadcloth, and the flesh and blood within it, can imagine—drab minds in the ordinary not being imaginative, unless where crumpling up Russia, &c., may be concerned. And lastly comes a singularly graphic and rhetorical section, entitled "The English Mail-Coach," which must still be fresh in the memory of the readers of Blackwood; and which we only regret seeing in this isolated form, because we had hoped the yet unpublished but not unfinished sequel to the peerless Suspiria de profundis, of which it is virtually an instalment, would be given to us with despatch and completeness.
With lively sympathy we read in the author s preface, that the present series of miscellanies—as indeed their predecessors also—have been corrected for the press, and partially recast from their original form, "under the distraction of a nervous misery which," he says, "embarrasses my efforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible by words." If, in England, a pension be "that which should accompany old age," when old age is dignified by genius, hastened by literary toil, saddened by physical languor, and straitened in the res domi,—how is it, purse-bearers! grand pensionaries! treasury lords! and all whom this affects—how is it that Thomas de Quincey is not, even yet, on the pension-list?
To the æsthetical dissertation on "Murder, as one of the Fine Arts"—that elaborate whimsicality, all alive with fun, broad and recondite—the author has appended an account of the notorious Williams, the London murderer of a past generation; not only, he says, because the man himself merited a record for his matchless audacity, combined with so much of snaky subtlety, and even insinuating amiableness in his demeanour—but also because, apart from the man himself, the works of the man (in 1812) were in themselves, for dramatic effect, the most impressive on record. Southey observed to the author, that the Marr and Williamson murders "ranked amongst the few domestic events which, by the depth and the expansion of horrors attending them, had risen to the dignity of a national interest." Mr. de Quincey adds, that this interest benefited
- ↑ Miscellanies. By Thomas de Quincey. (Second Series.) Groombridge and Sons. 1854.
