throne of English prose literature.”  Let it be that Sam was a proper king; yet it is just as true that De Quincey was legitimately his successor.  First, in the matter of time:  Sam died in 1784, and De Quincey was born in 1785, just in time to continue the regal line.  What was it, again, that entitled Johnson to kingly honors?  Was it learning?  De Quincey was as erudite.  Was it his style?  There is no writer in the language who in that matter may look down on De Quincey.

If there ever was a writer “damned with faint praise,” it was De Quincey.  Some stupid writer for the London “Athenaeum,” for instance, dared to compliment the poor “opium-chewer” after the following style:—­“He possessed taste, but he lacked creative energy; and his subtle and highly refined intellect was ingenious and acute rather than powerful.”  This reminds me of a criticism once passed upon Shakspeare by a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had considerable genius, but very little taste!]

Else I should plunge in medias res upon a sketch of De Quincey’s life; were it not a rudeness amounting to downright profanity to omit the important ceremony of prelibation, and that at a banquet to which, implicitly, gods are invited.  The reader will assuredly unite with me in all such courtesies,—­

  “Neu desint epulis rosae”;

particularly as the shade we deal with can be evoked only by peculiar incantations,—­only the heralding of certain precise claims will this monarch listen to as the just inferiae, the fitting sacrifice or hecatomb of our homage.

The key-note of preparation, the claim which preeminently should be set forth in advance, is this:  that De Quincey was the prince of hierophants, or of pontifical hierarchs, as regards all those profound mysteries which from the beginning have swayed the human heart, sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it upwards to an altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with the shock of quaking anguish, down to earth.  As it was the function of the hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as concrete incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey’s to reveal in open light the everlasting symbols, universally intelligible when once disclosed, which are folded in the involutions of dreams and of those meditations which most resemble dreams; and as to the manner of these revelations, no Roman pontifex maximus, were it even Caesar himself, could have rivalled their magisterial pomp.

The peculiarities of his life all point in the direction here indicated.  It was his remarkable experience which furnished him the key to certain secret recesses of human nature hitherto sealed up in darkness.  Along that border-line by which the glimmerings of consciousness are, as by the thinnest, yet the most impervious veil, separated from the regions of the unexplored and the undefinable, De Quincey walked familiarly