THE QUESTION OF STYLE
style of his own; some of them, indeed, have a number of styles, to be donned and doffed upon occasion; but the one trait that they all have in common is a frank audacity of new combinations, a tendency to take liberties with noun and adjective, and pair them off with as little ceremony as a hostess pairs off her guests for a cotillion—and with as little malice. De Quincey wrote, not without a grain of literary snobbishness:
Like boys who are throwing the sun's rays in the eyes of a mob by means of a mirror, you must shift your lights and vibrate your reflections at every possible angle, if you would agitate the popular mind extensively.
De Quincey, of course, had a certain ingrained scorn of the popular mind. It was quite unconsciously, while here intending to stigmatise a type of bad rhetoric, that he actually gave us a rather vivid
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