( 142 )
On one of those Ambrosial Nights, when ginger was hot in the mouth of North and Tickler, and many another "image of God cut in Ebony," the most virtuous of whom rejoiced in intolerable quantities of cakes and ale, the magnificent preses, Christopher himself, took occasion to toast a distinguished guest, the English Opium-eater, in the following terms:—"Gentlemen, I propose in one sentence, with all the honours, the health of Thomas de Quincey—a person of the highest intellectual and imaginative powers—a Metaphysician, a Logician, and a Political Economist of the first order—a profound and comprehensive Scholar—a perfect Gentleman—and one of the best of Men."[1] And the health wee drunk, as meet and right it was, "with prodigious acclamation," by a symposium made up of such beaux esprits as Buller and Seward (recently restored to public life in the "Dies Boreales"), Moir and Macnish, Jamie Ballantyne and Watson Gordon, Tickler and Hogg. The terms of this éloge pertain to the more solid and serious attributes of De Quincey’s character, personal and professional, They do not include one aspect—the humorous—to which I now devote a few illustrative paragraphs. That aspect seems to have a sufficiently individual and prononcé nature to have merited notice among the other qualities to which Sir Christopher directed attention. Is not De Quincey among the humorists? As surely as he is among the scholars—the philosophers—the critics—the imaginative and pathetic writers—the originals of our time.
Yet the comedy in which he indulges is certainly not known and read of all men. It is perhaps caviare to the general. Many people who are in a roar at the first remote accents of Buckstone's voice, heard from behind a canvas side-scene at the little theatre in the Haymarket, and who laugh three hours by Shrewsbury clock at the faintest scintillations of fun in Dickens, travel through page after page of De Quincey's elaborate mirth without one contraction, or rather expansion, of their facial muscles, or one twinge or ache in the region of the sides. Some them are as little conscious the while that they are meant to laugh, as M. Jourdain was that his every-day converse attained the sublime altitude of rose. A venerable she-peasant was once moved to tears (not of gaiety) by listening to the recitation of some crack parts of "Hudibras;" and, being interrogated as to the origin of this curious psychological, phenomenon, made tremulous reply—"Oh, sir, them verses do sound so affecting!" I have seen readers of the Opium-eater’s frolicsome passages demeaning themselves in 1 manner just as uncalled for—barring the "natural drops;" gravely, grimly perusing a jeu d'ésprit
- ↑ It is some twenty years since De Quincey was thus glowingly but justly characterised. Since then he has contributed many a splendid treatise, tractate, or what you will, to our literature. Why is not his name on the pension list? Already has this question been (Scotticè) "asked at" the government; but neither so Frequently or so urgently as the case justifies, considering what manner of man this is.
