innumerable through his other writings, show that he took his stand on established Christian orthodoxy. He avowed his belief in a miraculous revelation from God to mankind, begun and continued in the history of the Jewish race, and consummated in the life of Christ and in the diffusion of Christianity by the Apostles. As a reasoned piece of Christian apologetics his answer to Hume's argument, entitled Miracles as Subjects of Testimony, does not seem to have won much regard from theologians, and, though very subtle, is certainly deficient in the homely quality which Hobbes called bite. His own religious faith, indeed, appears to have been very much of the nature of an inherited sentiment, independent of reasoning, and which he would not let reasoning disturb. In one respect, too, his theology was of what many theologians now would call a narrow and old-fashioned kind. There is no trace in him of that notion of a universal religious inspiration among the nations, and so of a certain respectability, greater or less, in all mythologies, which has been fostered by the modern science of religions. On the contrary, Christianity is with him the single divine revelation in the world, and he thinks and speaks of the Pagan religions, in the style of the old-fashioned. theology, as simply false religions, horrid religions, inventions of the spirit of evil. How this is to be reconciled with his wide range of historical sympathy, and especially with his admiration. of the achievements of the Greek intellect and the grandeur of the Roman character, it might be difficult to say. Probably it was because he distinguished between those noble and admirable developments which human nature could work out for itself, and which therefore belong to humanity as such, and the more rare and spiritual possibilities which he believed actual revelation had woven into the web of humanity, and which were to be regarded as gifts from the supernatural. At all events, the matter stands as has been stated. In the same way, Mahometanism figures in his regard as of little worth, monotheistic certainly and therefore superior to the Pagan creeds, but a spurious religion and partly stolen. Further, De Quincey's Christianity declares itself as deliberately of the Protestant species. With much respect for Roman Catholicism, he yet repudiates it as in great measure a corruption of the original system, which original system he finds reproduced in the Protestantism of the sixteenth century. His article entitled Protestantism is an exposition of his views in that matter, and is altogether a very able and important paper. If

he has seemed narrow hitherto in his philosophy of religion, here, once within the bounds of his Protestantism, and engaged in defining Protestantism, he becomes broad enough. "The selfsufficingness of the Bible and the right of private judgment" are, he maintains, "the two great characters in which Protestantism commences," and the doctrines by which it distinguishes itself from the Church of Rome. Bound up in these doctrines, he maintains, is the duty of absolute religious toleration; and by this principle of absolute religious toleration, the right of the individual to think, print, and publish what he pleases, he abides with exemplary fidelity through all his writings, even while in skirmish with the free-thinkers for whom he has the strongest personal disgust. But this is not all. He abjures Bibliolatry, or that kind of respect for the letter of the Bible which is founded on the notion of verbal inspiration, denying it to be a necessary tenet of Protestantism, or to be possible indeed for any scholarly understanding. It is not only, he maintains, that the notion of literal or verbal inspiration is broken down at once by recollection of the corruptions of the original text of the Scriptures, their various readings, and the fact that it is only in translations that the Scriptures exist for the masses of mankind in all countries. He addresses himself more emphatically to the alleged palpable errors in the substance and teachings of the Bible, its violations of history and chronology, its inconsistencies with modern science. Here he refuses at once that method of reconciling science with Scripture which proceeds by torture of texts into meanings different from those which they bore to the Hebrews or the Greeks who first read them. His bold principle is that Science and the Bible cannot be reconciled in such matters, and that the desire to reconcile them indicates a most gross and carnal misconception of the very idea of a divine revelation. The principle may be given in his own words:

It is an obligation resting upon the Bible, if it is to be consistent with itself, that it should refuse to teach science; and, if the Bible ever had taught any one art, science, or process of life, it would have been asked, Is a divine mission abandoned suddenly for a human mission? By what caprice is this one science taught, and others not? Or these two, suppose, and not all? But an objection even deadlier would have followed. It is clear as is the purpose of daylight that the whole body of the arts and sciences comprises one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect. For this end they exist. To see God, therefore, descending into the arena of science, and contending, as it were, for his own prizes, by teaching science

in the Bible, would be to see him intercepting from their self-evident destination (viz., man's intellectual benefit) his own problems by solving them himself. No spectacle could more dishonour the divine idea, could more injure man under the mask of aiding him. The Bible must not teach anything that man can teach himself.

The revelation of the Old and New Testaments is to be regarded, then, according to De Quincey, as a leaven of truths purely moral and spiritual, sent into the world by miracle precisely because man could never have found them out for himself, with a careful abstinence from any mixture of matter of ordinary knowledge in advance of what was already existent, and therefore with an adoption of all existing historical and scientific phrases and traditions. Hence Bibliolatry, in the sense of a belief in the immaculate correctness of the language and statements of the Bible on all subjects whatsoever, was no tenet of genuine Christianity, secure as every Christian ought to be that, whatever changes of conception on such subjects as the antiquity of the human race, or the system of the physical universe, might come with the progress of the human intelligence, the supernatural leaven would impregnate them as they came, and go on working. In this doctrine, of which De Quincey seems to have meditated a particular application in his unfinished papers entitled "Memorial Chronology,' he was substantially at one with Coleridge and Wordsworth. He was at one with them, too, in his affection for Church-Establishments. In remarkable difference from his favourite Milton, who regarded the incorporation of Church and State as the cause of the vitiation of the supernatural leaven in the world, and scowled back with hatred on the Emperor Constantine as the beginner of that mischief, De Quincey confessed to a special kindness for Constantine, precisely because that Emperor had conceived the idea of converting Christianity into a political agency. It was Constantine who had carried Christian teaching into effect in such institutions as hospitals and public provision for the poor; and the prospects of the world for the future were bound up with the possible extensions of the political influence of Christianity in similar directions. That is the subject of the essay entitled On Christianity as an Organ of Political Movement. In short, De Quincey is to be remembered, in his religious relations, as a staunch Church-of-England man of the broad school, not given to High-Church sacerdotalism, though with an æsthetic liking in his own case for a comely ritual.

In politics De Quincey was an English Tory. In the two papers entitled A Tory's Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism, and On the Political Parties of Modern England, he avows his partisanship. Toryism asserts itself also in the article on Dr. Parr, and tinges some of the other papers. It is interesting, indeed, to observe how much of the " 'John Bull element," as Mr. Page calls it, there was, all in all, in the feeble little man. His patriotism was of the old type of the days of Pitt and Nelson. He exulted in the historic glories of England and her imperial ascendency in so many parts of the globe, and would have had her do battle for any punctilio of honour, as readily as for any more visible interest, in her dealings with foreigners. He had a good deal of the old English anti-Gallican prejudice; and, though he has done justice, over and over again, to some of the finer characteristics of the French, the total effect of his remarks on the French, politically and intellectually, is irritating to the admirers of that great nation. He knew them only through books or by casual observation of stray Frenchmen he met; for he was never out of the British Islands, and never experienced that sudden awakening of a positive affection for the French which comes infallibly from even a single visit to their lightsome capital. On the other hand, though Scotland was his home for so large a part of his life, he seems never to have contracted the least sympathy with anything distinctively Scottish. Even his Toryism was specially English or South-British. But, like all other parts of his creed, his Toryism was of a highly intellectual kind, with features of its own. In such questions, for example, as that of the continuance of flogging and other brutal forms of punishment in the army and navy and elsewhere, he parted company with the ordinary mass of Tories, leaving his curse with them in that particular, and went with the current of Radical sentiment and opinion. How far he was carried, by his candour of intellect and depth and accuracy of scholarship, from the ordinary rut of party commonplace, may be judged also from his little paper entitled Falsification of English History. It is a gallant little paper, and one of the best rebukes in our language to that systematic vilification of the Puritan Revolution, the English Commonwealth, and the Reign of Cromwell, which has come down in the Anglican mind as an inheritance from the Restoration, and still vulgarizes so much of our scholarship and our literature.

The Dialogues of the Three Templars and the Logic of Political

Economy are De Quincey's chief contributions to the literature literary deftness of the essay For cutting lucidity of exposi

of Economic Science. As to the and the treatise there is no doubt. tion and beauty of style they are to be envied by most writers on Political Economy. This seems to have been felt by Mr. John Stuart Mill, who mentions De Quincey with respect, and uses quotations from him thankfully, in parts of his standard work. The question rather is whether De Quincey has any title, such as he himself seemed to claim, to the character of an original thinker in the matter of the science. Mr. Mill's language in one place appears to negative this claim, though very gently; and the question has been reopened, in De Quincey's interest, by Mr. Shadworth Hodgson in an essay entitled "De Quincey as Political Economist." Enough here on that matter.

If De Quincey surpasses himself anywhere in his didactic papers, it is in those that concern Literary Theory and Criticism. No English writer has left a finer body of disquisition on the science and principles of Literature than will be found in De Quincey's general papers entitled Rhetoric, Style, and Language, and his Letters to a Young Man, together with his more particular articles entitled Theory of Greek Tragedy, The Antigone of Sophocles, Milton, Milton versus Southey and Landor, Alexander Pope, Lord Carlisle on Pope, Schlosser's Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, and On Wordsworth's Poetry. There, or elsewhere, in De Quincey, will be found the last word, so far as there can be a last word, on some of the most important questions of style or literary art, and a treatment of literary questions throwing back into mere obsolete ineptitude the literary theories of such masters of the eighteenth century as Addison and Johnson, and of such of their successors as the acute Jeffrey and the robust but coarsegrained Whately. Goethe, the greatest literary critic that ever lived, was more comprehensive and universally tolerant; but De Quincey was facile princeps,1 to the extent of his touch, among the English critics of his generation. He acknowledged that he had received some of his leading ideas in literary art from Wordsworth originally; but whatever he derived from Wordsworth was matured by so much independent reflection, and so modified by the peculiarities of his own temperament, that the result was a system of precepts differing from Wordsworth's in not a few points.

1 [Easily the chief.]