to the Frenchman adorn a single volume out of twenty-two, in the Boston edition.  Nor is this one imperial column adorned by these alone:  there are, besides,—­alas for Rousseau!—­two other spolia opima by which the French master is, in his own field, proved not the first, nor even the second,—­proximus, sed non secundus,—­so wide is the distance between De Quincey and any other antagonist.  These two are the essays respectively entitled, “Joan of Arc,” and “The English Mail-Coach.”

[Footnote A:  Of De Quincey’s humor, a friend once remarked to me, that it always reminded him of an elephant attempting to dance.  Now, without any doubt, an elephant could dance after an elephantine fashion; but surely you would never catch him going through the movements of a jig or a Virginia “breakdown.”  He never lets you forget that he is an elephant.  So with De Quincey.  Levity is an element farthest removed from his humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all, you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a tragedy of pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey’s works.

There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen Aristophaneses.  There was something, too, in its order, by which it resembled the gigantesque features of the old Greek master.  I will illustrate my meaning by a single instance from each.  In Aristophanes’s “Clouds,” Strepsiades is being initiated into the Socratic Phrontisterium, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs his pupil’s attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes.  But the moon only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm about his ears with lunar exactness, (literally so, since the Greeks paid, or refused to pay, regularly on the last day of the month,)—­and here it is that the opportunity is offered for a monstrous stroke of humor; for, at this crisis, Strepsy is made to exclaim, “Some magic is it, O Socrates, about the moon?  Well! since you are up to that sort of thing, what do you say, now, to a spell by which I could snap the old monster out of her course for a generation or so?” Now for the parallel case from De Quincey.  It is from his paper on “California,” a politico-economical treatise.  The author’s object is to illustrate the fact that scarcity of gold is not due to its non-existence, but to the difficulty of obtaining it.  “Emeralds and sapphires,” says he, “are lying at this moment in a place which I could indicate, and no policeman is on duty in the whole neighborhood to hinder me or the reader from pocketing as many as we please.  We are also at perfect liberty to pocket the anchors of Her Majesty’s ship the Victoria, (one hundred and twenty guns,) and to sell them for old iron.  Pocket them by all means, and I engage that the magistrate sitting at the Thames police-office will have too much respect for your powers to think of detaining you.  If he does, your course is to pocket the police-office, and all which it inherits.  The man that pockets an anchor may be a dangerous customer, but not a customer to be sneezed at.”  This strikes us as very similar to Strepsiades’s bagging the moon.]