Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;
nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in the
counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, to
a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane
truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and
to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in
Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and
their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of
those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his
decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin;
Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of
all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with
his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his
bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier
Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey.
He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters,
a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented
in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson's _Noctes
Ambrosianæ_. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It
remained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold and
brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar;
the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies are
as jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the salt
of the earth. It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo,
which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockney
cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quincey
with it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly have
been a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, if he had got
drunk on toddy with Wilson, instead of getting calm and clear (as he
himself describes) on opium, and with no company but a book of German