His
erudition and insight are always a little in advance of his good
judgment.
As to the works of the first class, the _Reminiscences_ are defaced
by the shrewish spirit shown in the accounts of Wordsworth and other
friends; nor can we depend upon them as records of fact. But our author
had had exceptional opportunities to observe these famous men and
women, and he possessed no little insight into literature and
personality. As to the _Autobiographic Sketches_, the handling of
events is hopelessly arbitrary and fragmentary. In truth, De Quincey is
drawing an idealized picture of childhood,--creating a type rather than
re-creating a person; it is a study of a child of talent that we
receive from him, and as such these sketches form one of the most
satisfactory products of his pen.
The _Confessions_ as a narrative is related to the Autobiography,
while its poetical passages range it with the _Suspiria_ and the
_Mail-Coach_. De Quincey seems to have believed that he was
creating in such writings a new literary type of prose poetry or prose
phantasy; he had, with his splendid dreams as subject-matter, lifted
prose to heights hitherto scaled only by the poet. In reality his style
owed much to the seventeenth-century writers, such as Milton and Sir
Thomas Browne. He took part with Coleridge, Lamb, and others in the
general revival of interest in earlier modern English prose, which is a
feature of the Romantic Movement.
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