valour of Maximilian, it is but a wreck of the pilgrim-army that enters Klosterheim on the morrow, and then alas! without Maximilian among them. He has been carried away by the marauders, a wounded prisoner. The residue of the poor pilgrims are dispersed through the city somehow for hospitality, and the doleful Lady Paulina takes up her abode in the great abbey, close to the Landgrave's palace. Then, for a while, we are among the Klosterheimers, and called upon to pity them. For the gloomy Landgrave, always a tyrant, now revels in acts of tyranny and cruelty utterly indiscriminate and capricious, maddened by the goad of some new motive, which is not explained, but which we connect with intelligence he has obtained from the abstracted imperial despatches. There are arrests of students and citizens; all are in consternation; no one knows what will happen next. Suddenly, however, a counter-agency is at work in Klosterheim, baffling and bewildering the Landgrave and his wily Italian minister Adorni. This is a certain mysterious being, whether human or supernatural no one can tell, who calls himself "The Masque," and seems omnipresent and resistless. He appears when and where he likes, passes through bolts and bars, leaves messages to the Landgrave nailed up in public places, and defies his police. Houses are entered; citizens disappear, sometimes with signs of scuffle and bloodshed left in their rooms; and, as these victims of "The Masque" are not exclusively from the ranks of the Landgrave's partisans, it becomes doubtful whether the mysterious being has any political purpose, or is a mere demon of general malignity. But, evidently, the Landgrave is his main mark; and it is in the palace of the Landgrave that he makes his presence and his power most daringly felt. How, for example, he appeared there at a great masked ball, to which exactly twelve hundred persons had been invited by numbered tickets; how, when the twelve hundred had been, by arrangement, counted off in the hall, and aggregated apart, he was seen in majestic and solitary composure, leaning against a marble column, and it seemed as if the Landgrave and Adorni had but to give the word to their myrmidons to clutch him; but how there was nothing of that expected catastrophe, but only a scornful disappearance of the awful figure, as if in cloud or smoke, after some words from his hollow voice which left the Landgrave trembling: for all this, and much more, there must be application inside the little volume itself. In reading it, you are as if in the heart of one of Mrs.

Radcliffe's novels, with the usual paraphernalia of cloaks, nodding plumes, ghostly sounds, labyrinthine corridors and secret passages, pictures of ancestors on the walls, and the rest of it; and you long to be out of such a curiosity shop of jumbled incredibilities, and to know the dénouement. That does not come till after new episodes of danger to Lady Paulina, new coils of marvel round the mysterious "Masque," and a second great assembly in the palace, with a vast mechanism of new preparations by the infuriated Landgrave for the discomfiture of his adversary. Let these be supposed; and let it be supposed that the 6th of September, 1634, has passed, and that the Swedes have been routed and the Imperialists triumphant in the great battle of Nördlingen. What need then for further mystery? The hour has come for that revolution in Klosterheim which the Emperor himself had devised from Vienna, and manipulated in the secret despatches he had sent by the Lady Paulina. All is revealed in a crash. Maximilian is the true Landgrave, the hitherto undivulged son of the last good Landgrave; and the present usurper had come to his power by the murder of Maximilian's father, and maintained it by other crimes. In the crash of this revelation the gloomy usurper sinks, the last blow to the wretched man being the death of his daughter by a mistake of his own murderous order for the execution of the Lady Paulina. Maximilian marries Paulina; there are other more minute solutions and surprises; and the Klosterheimers, under their new Landgrave, are again a happy people. But who was the mysterious "Masque"? Who but Maximilian himself? Trap-doors and subterranean passages, his own dexterity, and collusion with the requisite number of citizens and students, and with an old seneschal of the tyrant, had done the whole business; and the only blood really shed in the course of it had been that of the poor seneschal, betrayed by accident, and stabbed by his master.

Such is De Quincey's one-volume romance, a poor performance, doubtless for the sake of a little money, about the time when he settled in Edinburgh. Was he ashamed of it afterwards, that he did not reprint it? There was no necessity for that; for, though the story does not show the craft of a Sir Walter Scott, it is by no means bad of its preposterous kind. The style, at all events, is remarkably careful, with a marble beauty of sentence that makes one linger as one reads.

There remains to be noticed, in the last place, that very special

portion of De Quincey's writings of the imaginative order for which he claimed distinction above the rest, as illustrating "a mode of impassioned prose" but slightly represented before in English Literature. It may be questioned, however, whether the pieces for which he claimed this distinction are described most exactly by the phrase "impassioned prose." Their peculiarity is not so much that they are impassioned in any ordinary sense as that they are imaginative or poetical after a very definite and rather rare sort. It was one of the distinctions of De Quincey's intellect that it could pass from that ordinary or discursive exercise of itself which consists in expounding, reasoning, or investigating, to that poetic exercise of itself which consists in the formation of visions or phantasies; and it did, in fact, so pass on those occasions more particularly when it was moved by pathos or by the feeling of the mysterious and awful. What is most observable, therefore, in the pieces under notice is that they exhibit the operation of those two constitutional kinds of emotion upon De Quincey's intellectual activity, transmuting it from the common or discursive mode to that called poetic imagination. Inasmuch as it is the implicated feeling or sentiment that moves the intellectual process, and inasmuch as there are marks of this in the rhythmical or lyrical character of the result, there is no great harm in calling that result impassioned prose, especially if we keep to the limitation stipulated by De Quincey's own phrase, "a mode of impassioned prose"; but it is better, all in all, to define the writings under consideration as examples of a peculiar "mode of imaginative prose," and, if further definition is wanted of this peculiar mode of prose poetry, to call it Prose Phantasy and Lyric, or Lyrical Prose Phantasy. De Quincey was consciously and deliberately an artist in this form of prose-poetry, and has left specimens of it that have very few parallels in English. One ought to remember, however, how much he must have been influenced by the previous example of Jean Paul Richter. Of his admiration of the famous German before he had himself begun his career of literature there is proof in his article on Richter published in the London Magazine in December, 1821, just after the appearance of his Confessions in their first form in the same Magazine; and one observes that among the translated "analects" from Richter which accompanied or followed that article, and were intended to introduce Richter to the English public, were The Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden and the Dream

upon the Universe, both of them specimens of Richter's peculiar art of prose-phantasy. There can be no doubt that Richter's example in such pieces influenced De Quincey permanently. But, though he may have learnt something from Richter, he was an original master in the same art.

One might go back here on his Joan of Arc, and some of the other writings of which account has been already taken, and claim for them, or for parts of them, fresh recognition in our present connection. But let us confine ourselves to the writings to which De Quincey seems to have pointed more especially, and which have been already enumerated.

To the famous passages of "dream-phantasy" in the Opium Confessions we need not readvert farther than to say that, extraordinary as they are as a whole, one may fairly object to parts of them, as to some of the similar dream-phantasies in Richter, that they fail by too much obtrusion of artistic self-consciousness in their construction, and sometimes also by a swooning of the power of clear and consecutive vision in a mere piling and excess of imagery and sound. The stroke on the mind at the time is not always equal to the look of the apparatus for inflicting it; and the memory does not retain a sufficient scar. No such objection can be urged against The Daughter of Lebanon, a fine visionary lyric of seven pages, figuring an early and miraculous conversion to Christianity in the person of an ideal girl of Damascus. Nor could any of De Quincey's readers give up the first two sections of The English Mail Coach, subtitled "The Glory of Motion" and "The Vision of Sudden Death." There is nothing in Jean Paul quite like these.

In the first we are back in the old days between Trafalgar and Waterloo. Drawn up at the General Post Office in Lombard Street, and waiting for the hour to start, we see His Majesty's mails, carriages, harness, horses, lamps, the dresses of driver and guard, all in the perfection of English equipment, and, if there has been news that day of a great victory, then the laurels, the oak leaves, the flowers, the ribbons, in addition. Seating ourselves beside the driver on one of the mails, we begin our journey of three hundred miles along one of the great roads, north or west, leaving Lombard Street at a quarter past eight in the evening. How, once out into the country, we shoot along, horses at gallop, the breeze in our faces, hedges and trees and fields and homesteads rushing past us in the darkness which we and our

lamps are cleaving like a fiery arrow! How, at every stoppingstation, there are the lights and bustle at the inn-door, and the laurels and other bedizenments we carry are seen ere we have well stopped, and we shout "Badajoz" or "Salamanca" in explanation, or whatever else may have been the last victory, and the hostlers and other inn-folk take up the huzza, and it is one round of congratulation and hand-shaking while we stay! But, punctually to the minute, having changed horses, and left the news palpitating in that neighbourhood, we are on again, horses at gallop, coach-lamps burning, and we beside the driver on the front seat, conscious that we are carrying the same news with us to neighbourhoods still ahead! On, on, stage after stage, in the same fashion, still cleaving the darkness, the horse-hoofs always audible and the coach-lamps always burning, till the darkness yields to a silver glimmer and the glimmer to the glare of day! — Such is the series of sensations De Quincey has contrived to give us in his prose-poem called "The Glory of Motion." In the sequel, entitled "The Vision of Sudden Death," we are still on the same night journey by coach, or rather on one later night journey on the northern road between sixty and seventy years ago, with the difference that the glory of motion is now turned into horror. Prosaically described, the paper is a recollection of a fatal accident by collision of the mail, in a very dark part of the road, with a solitary vehicle containing two persons, one of them a woman; but it is for the paper itself to show what the incident becomes in De Quincey's hands. It passes into a third paper, still under the same general title of The English Mail Coach; which third paper indeed, bears the extraordinary subtitle of "Dream-Fugue, founded on the preceding theme of Sudden Death." I cannot say that this "dream-fugue," which is offered as a lyrical finale to the little series, in visionary coherence with the preceding pieces, accomplishes its purpose very successfully. It is liable to the objection which may be urged, as we have said, against other specimens of De Quincey in the peculiar art of dream-phantasy. The artifice is too apparent, and the meaning is all but lost in a mere vague of music.

Of the three scraps of the Suspiria that are entitled to rank among the lyrical prose-phantasies, viz., Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, Savannah-la-Mar, and Memorial Suspiria, only the first is of much importance. But that scrap, written in De Quincey's later life, is of as high importance as anything he ever wrote.