More than this we do not claim; but no one who has any acquaintance with the works of Ricardo, will require a further proof that the English Opium Eater is a writer whose works deserve earnest study from all who love clear and far seeing thought.

Leaving political economy, and entering the wider field of history, professing also no longer to abide with psychological correctness by the faculty of analysis, but seeking the traces of general power and clearness of intellect, we would advance the general proposition, That De Quincey has looked over the course of humanity with such a searching, philosophic glance, that, desultory though his teaching has been, he has discerned and embodied in his works certain truths of the last importance. They are of that sort which may be called illuminative; they are rays of light which go along the whole course of time, revealing and harmonizing; their value can be fully appreciated only when one traverses history, carrying them as lamps in his hand, and observing how, in their light, the confused becomes orderly, the dark becomes bright.

We cannot find a better instance than in his ideas regarding war. These furnish, indeed, a remarkable case, and that with which we have been most struck; we think it of itself sufficient to justify what we have above advanced. We had long been of opinion that the ideas regarding war, which not only floated in the public mind, but found countenance from men of high and unquestionable powers, were singularly superficial and unsound; from Foster and Carlyle to John Bright, we heard no word on the subject with which we could agree. It was the first general glance, and that alone, which was taken; the observations on which the arguments were based, were such as every child must again and again have made,

that war was

accompanied with great effusion of blood, that in its scowl the face of the world gathered blackness as of death, that there was no enmity or personal quarrel between the individual combatants, and the like. Foster we found unable to thrill to the ardors of the "Iliad;" or, if he did experience a rising sense of its glories, we saw him shrinking as from sin, and likening the poem to a beautiful but deadly knife. Carlyle, with a satire whose intense cleverness made cool examination of the philosophic value of his words almost impossible, resolved our French wars into the aimless volleys by which the peaceful inhabitants of two far-separated French and English villages of “Dumbdrudge” exterminated each other. We found no clear conception of the function, in the evolution of human civilization, of agencies in themselves calamitous: no philosophic conception of war in its real nature, as the most direful yet indispensable of the effects of reason acting under the curse of labor and the obscuration of sin, — the sublimely fearful yet necessary lightning, which has flashed in the night of human history. Such were our notions, when we happened to fall in with an article by De Quincey, in which he treated of war. A glance was sufficient. The germs of a whole philosophy of war were before us; every lingering doubt was dissipated. And it was a consoling assurance that our views were not, as they looked, peculiarly savage, to find that De Quincey, whose womanly tenderness is, to our knowledge, unexampled in literature, yet sympathized, with calmest deliberation and profound intensity, in those feelings to which men have ever attached sublimity, from the shouts of Marathon to the thunders of Trafalgar. But could we have imagined a linguistic garb like that in which his reasonings were arrayed? How perfect was the mastery with which the whole theme was

grasped! He played with his subject; he touched it with his magician wand, and it took what colors he chose. Whatever of dimness had attached to our ideas, was dissipated as mist by sunlight; all was boldly, clearly, definitely evolved. The thoughts leaped forth in the mail of logic and the plumes of poetry.

This paper on war we would cite as, on the whole, singularly characteristic of De Quincey. Here, most emphatically, is there attested the danger of trusting to first appearances and impressions. Philosophy and fun so intermingle their parts, that one is astonished and startled. Now all seems mirth and jollity; the writer is intent on proving that the ancients pilfered jokes on a large scale from the moderns; that it must have been the former and not the latter, is plain, from the fact, that those were "heathens, infidels, pagan dogs." Then you have a long detail respecting a fund which is to be commenced by a half-crown legacy of De Quincey's, and which is to be put into requisition when the Peace Congress has prevailed, and war vanishes from human history. The fund may accumulate at any interest; ere required, it will, under any circumstances, have reached to the moon; therefore the man in the moon is named a trustee. The destination of the fund is the support of all those to be put out of employment when armies and fleets are disbanded; and the trustees are eloquently and earnestly charged to deal handsomely, nor bring disgrace on the testator's memory by niggardliness. And all this giggling alternates with flashes of revealing intuition, which rectify your every idea of human history, with truths which open up to you the vista of the past, and enable you to define the position of humanity in the present. It is an intermingled dance of northern lights, and far-illumining gleams of precious

radiance. The writer is as one sitting in a chariot at a Roman carnival, and flinging, from the same hand, crackers, and sugar plums, and lumps of pure gold. Ill is it for him who sees the crackers and sugar plums, and thinks there can be no gold! The remark applies more or less to the whole range of De Quincey's writings. No man can fail to perceive the jocularity of the paper we have been describing; but if it is important or indicative of high powers to see beneath all the superficial phenomena of war, and discern its true function in human history, if it is a proof of profundity, that a clear, indubitable light is cast into regions where Foster and Carlyle stumbled about as if blindfold, then we can appeal to the same article as a triumphant vindication of the sterling value of De Quincey's intellectual powers. And how strongly does this confirm what we have said respecting the perfect ease, the absolute want of effort, the free, careless naturalness with which he writes.

De Quincey has devoted several papers to an attempted proof that the sect of Essenes, mentioned by Josephus, were none other than the early Christians. The series is distinguished by great acuteness of argument, and possesses that fascination of style which characterizes every production of the author. The whole logic of the case is brought out in a figure, so simple, so precise, and yet so graceful, that we may quote it: "If, in an ancient palace, reopened after it had been shut up for centuries, you were to find a hundred golden shafts or pillars, for which nobody could suggest a place or a use; and if, in some other quarter of the palace, far remote, you were afterwards to find a hundred golden sockets fixed in the floor, first of all, pillars which nobody could apply to any purpose, or refer to any place; secondly, sockets which nobody could fill, — probably even

'wicked Will Whiston' might be capable of a glimmering suspicion that the hundred golden shafts belonged to the hundred golden sockets. And if it should turn out that each several shaft screwed into its own peculiar socket, why, in such a case, not 'Whiston, Ditton, and Co.' could resist the evidence, that each enigma had brought a key to the other; and that by means of two mysteries there had ceased even to be one mystery." The unoccupied sockets are the several heads in the description of the Essenes by Josephus; the missing pillars, the early Christians. Thus is the whole argument seen at a glance. But we cannot say that we have been convinced. We indeed think it remarkably probable that the early Christians and the Essenes were one and the same; but we cannot bring ourselves to regard Mr. De Quincey's manner of accounting for the name satisfactory. We cannot admit the theory of an assumed disguise on the part of the Christians. The plain command to confess Christ before men; the almost excessive valor of the early Christians, prompting them to court martyrdom; the contrariety of such a method of defence to the whole genius of the opposition by the true religion of all that is false in every age, which has always been to unsheathe the sword in the face of the foe, to fling away the scabbard, and to defy him in the name of the Lord; the scarcely conceivable possibility of Christians suddenly, as it were, ducking their heads before the wave of persecution, and emerging again, unrecognized, as Essenes; these and similar considerations close the avenues of our mind to the most plausible array of proofs which could be adduced against them. But not only are these papers marked by high ingenuity; they contain striking gleams of insight into the whole course of the development of Christianity. We think, for instance, that the following remark is not more