his great importance to literature lies in the new possibilities which he revealed in English prose. He has himself in the Confessions associ ated together the names of the seventeenth-cen tury authors who come nearest to being his models in style: "Donne, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne. Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, Barrow form a pleiad of seven golden stars snch as no literature can match in their own class." But the claim involved in his designation of the Confessions and Suspiri« as "modes of impas sioned prose ranging under no precedents that 1 am aware of in any literature." may be justified by the fact that the gorgeous. colorful. and rhyth mical prose in which De Quincey equaled or sur passed his predecessors was in his hands a deliber ate and formal style, whose 'purple patches' are seldom out of place, and whose majestic and soul-stirring harmonies can be paralleled only among musical instruments by the rich fullness of a great organ. lInskin is his most conspicuous successor in this style; but it had a wide influence throughout the remainder of the century. His writing is far from faultless: it has two consid erable defects—a tendency to lapse, in the midst of a lofty strain, into pointless triviality, and a discursiveness which renders it impossible for him to go straight along the high road of his main thought without darting off to right and left to explore little green lanes of whimsical fancy or erudite allusion. Ile will never, perhaps, he t
popular writer. Ile postulates in the reader who is to enjoy him fully too similar an equipment in culture. in imagination. in wide knowledge of books and men: hut for that very he must remain all the more valued by those who are alibi. to appreciate him—an intellectual luxury and stimulus alike. According to his own famous dis tinction between the 'literature of knowledge' and the 'literature of power.' it is to the latter class that his own work belongs; and of it may be predicated his general conclusion that such litera ture will remain "triumphant forever, as long as the language exists in which it speaks." : 11 is (',11.ete(1 11'n ti nys, ed. by :1/41a- ron (14 toll.. London. ls•s9-911. and smite ad ottionil I ,•//, tub II ritiags, ed. by Nogg t IsOlit; Japp t"11..k. )'age"), 1,s e tin,! 11rtliogsc (•1 it (,1 ,,,, , tot.,, ib., 1s77 ; Masson, lit