pendous as it is, it is incomplete; it abounds with inaccuracies and indelicate allusions; it wants a true and profound insight into the causes of Roman decline; as a narrative, it is indirect, cumbrous, and frequently obscure; as a composition, its colours are often false, barbaric, and overlaid, and though sparkling with sudden brilliances, it has no sustained power or splendour. What a different, and, in many respects, what a superior and monumental work of it might De Quincey have made, had he, ten or twenty years ago, set himself resolutely to the task! In the year 1839, after long absence from the arena of Blackwood's Magazine, he leaped down upon it again, as with a thunder-tramp. He is the author of that series of scholarly articles which appeared since then, on "Milton," "The Philosophy of Roman History,” “Dinner, Real and Reputed," "The Essenes," "Style," "The Opium Question," "Ricardo made Easy," &c., &c. And a marvellous series it is, when you take it in connexion with his advanced age and shattered system. We were particularly interested by his paper on the "Essenes." It is in the style of the best of Horsley's sermons. He begins, as that prelate was wont, by the statement of what seems a hopeless paradox; but, ere he be done, he has surrounded it with such plausible analogies, he has darted upon it such a glare of learning, he has so fenced it in with bristling dilemmas, he has so cut the difficulties, and strangled the objections started against it, that you lay down the paper, believing, or, at least, wishing to believe, that the Essenes and the Christians were identical.

Besides this, Mr. De Quincey has written a long series of sketches in Tait's Magazine, of contemporary characters, of various merit, but some of which (we refer particularly to those of Coleridge, Southey, Charles Lamb, Hannah More, and Charles Lloyd) are quite worthy of his versatile and

vigorous pen. De Quincey! farewell! Many pleasing hours have we spent in the perusal of thy eloquent page, and not a few in listening to thy piercing words. Not a few tears have we given to thy early sorrows. With no little emotion have we followed the current of thy romantic narrative, now gliding by the "Towers of Julius," reflecting the abhorred agonies of hunger and abandonment, and mirroring the countenance of the lost Anne; now darkened by the shadow of the Welsh mountains, and again by the deeper darkness of thine own diseased and dream-haunted spirit ; and now murmuring calmer measures in rocky Cumberland, with the high front of Wordsworth, and the dim eye of Coleridge, like a nebulous star, looking down upon the still waters. May it close its race in splendour. May thine be the golden evening which often succeeds a troubled and tempestuous day. Again, fare-thee-well!

ness.

JOHN FOSTER.

"THE Essay," wrote a bookseller to a friend of the author, "is a specious composition for which there is now little demand." And there cannot be a doubt that the sagacious bibliopole spoke the result of his experience, though to account for the fact might not a little have puzzled his acuteWhy is it that this once most popular and delightful kind of literature, with all its slip-shod ease and fire-side graces, has died with Elia, or, if alive, preserves only a precarious and rickety existence? Why, while treatise, poem, tragedy, speech, sermon, in short, every other kind of literary composition, preserves its pristine and palmy honours, have essays and epics gone together to the sepulchre? Why,

while the classics in this department retain their proper niche in the library, and are read with eagerness and delight by those who go rather farther back in their literary researches than Nickleby and Jack Shepherd, is no one ambitious of adding to their number; of treading that quiet path where Addison, and Steele, and Franklin, and Hunt, and Lamb, have walked before; of recasting their limited but magic circle; swaying their tiny, but potent rod; emulating their nameless, but numberless graces, their good nature, their elegant raillery, their conversational ease, their fine shiftings to and fro, from tender sportiveness to sportive pathos, or their varied and idomatic style? Nay, who, though ambitious of this, could find a fit audience, if he found an audience at all? Is it that the cast of mind, of which the essay was the delicate offshoot, has disappeared from among men? Or is it that the essay is a kind of vegetable mule, like that from the Dianthus Superbus, which can be propagated, to a limited extent, but which, in the long run, dies away from lack of masculine vigour and real root in the literary herbarium? Or is it that the public has, from mere wantonness and caprice, "made a point," as poor Goldsmith has it, to read essays no more, however excellent in themselves? We think the cause lies somewhat deeper; though, after all, it is not very far from the surface. The essay was always a sort of literary light-horsemanship. It neither tested the highest powers of mind, nor did it propose to itself the noblest and profoundest purposes. Cast in a medium between the formality of a treatise, and the carelessness of a letter, it wanted the satisfactory completeness of the one, and the confidential charm of the other. It was suited eminently to an indolent and easy-minded age, like that on whose breakfast-tables shone The Tatlers, The Spectators, and The Guardians. For the amusement of the big-wigged and luxu

rious generation of Queen Anne, the essay was as admirably adapted as the sofa, that paradise of the parlour. In the days of the Miltons, the Vanes, and the Seldens, it would have attracted no more notice than the flutter of an ephemeron's wings. The idea is ludicrous of Cromwell lounging over a number of The Adventurer, or of Milton's daughter reading to him the account of the Club of little men. That age of high intellects, of strong and stormy passions, of deep religious purpose, was an age for Areopagiticas, not essays. Their light and elegant structure was better fitted for an age of French dress, small intrigue, modish manners, quiet, not keen, literary tastes, perfect politeness, and profound internal peace; when, for Cromwells we had Bolingbrokes ; for Miltons, Popes; for Seldens, Steeles; for goblets bubbling with royal blood, cups and saucers, brimful of the innocent novelty of tea! And it was clear that, if a more earnest and enthusiastic period were ever to dawn, the beautiful but somewhat flimsy pinions of the essay would be scorched in its radiance. It turned out as might have been expected. The French Revolution, while "innovating upon every thing, and leaving nothing,-no, nothing at all unchanged," threw down, en passant, the old landmarks of literature,— changed the very style of the world, which began to heave as if the hands of the writers were shaken by an earthquake, -to hurry as if they were afraid premature and preternatural darkness would blot the page, and to glow as if with a reflection of the furnace heat of the surrounding excitement, and, for the essay substituted the review, a far more pliable and powerful instrument. Since, various attempts have been made to revive that faded form of writing; and, unquestionably, in the Round Table of Hazlitt, the Indicator and Companion of Hunt, and the Reflector and Elia of Lamb, we find many of the graces, and much of the spirit of our elder

essayists, blended with a deeper insight, and a warmer imagination; but still the age of essays, as of chivalry, is too obviously gone. In reviews we have not essays but dissertations. In magazines, their place is supplied by tales and sketches. In the pages of our cheap literature they still partially survive. The truth is, our age is not sufficiently at its ease to relish the essay. It is too much occupied in devouring newspapers, glancing over reviews, bolting novels, and tearing out the heart of treatises of mechanical science, to read, as it runs, such short, delicate, and refined productions. To be taught or to be amused, to probe practical questions to the bottom, or to be lapped over head and ears in dreams of romance, is the tendency of the popular taste at present. The essay answers but indifferently any of these ends. And if ever, as is possible, we shall see it restored to its former-and more than its former-popularity, we must. first see the public mind in a less excited, a less eager, and more equable frame.

The subject of the following sketch was generally known as Foster the Essayist. But, in truth, the title was a misnomer. For his tone, style, purpose, beauties, and faults, alike marked him out from the ordinary herd of essayists, and from the gay writers of Queen Anne, and their imitators. Indeed it is not easy to say to what precise species of composition his extraordinary productions belong. They are not sermons, though they have much of the sermonizing vehemence, earnestness, and oracularity. They are not treatises, yet are elaborate, lengthy, and exhaustive. They are hardly essays, though they bear the name, and have much point, brilliance, and humour. Part of them profess to be letters to a friend; but all are greatly deficient in epistolary ease and grace. They are of the composite order of intellectual architecture; and, as such, require a severer